Prime Minister Paul Givan appears to be resigning

(dpa)

Northern Ireland Prime Minister Paul Givan has announced his resignation in protest at the agreed Brexit rules for Northern Ireland. “Today comes to an end what has been the privilege of my life – to serve as First Minister of Northern Ireland,” Givan of the Protestant Unionist party DUP told reporters on Thursday evening. He often felt the burden that comes with this office, said the politician.

The dispute over the so-called Northern Ireland Protocol, which the British government had negotiated with the EU in the wake of Brexit, had come to a head. Northern Ireland Agriculture Minister Edwin Poots of the DUP single-handedly announced that he would stop the customs controls on British imports agreed with the EU. The British government supported this move. The EU Commission, the coalition party Sinn Fein and neighboring Ireland, however, sharply criticized the announcement as illegal.

As a result, the carefully balanced unity government between the Protestant-leaning DUP, which advocates union with Great Britain, and the Catholic-Republican party Sinn Fein, which is striving for reunification with Ireland, cannot continue in its current form. Sinn Fein’s equal Deputy Prime Minister Michelle O’Neill would also have to step down.

Prime Minister Givan only took office in June after a fierce power struggle within the DUP. Party leader Jeffrey Donaldson has been threatening for months to withdraw his ministers from the unity government in protest at the Northern Ireland protocol.

The Northern Ireland Protocol stipulates that the British province will continue to follow the rules of the EU’s internal market and customs union. This avoids a hard border with Ireland, which would lead to new tensions in the former civil war zone. However, this created an intra-British customs border. The British government, which negotiated the protocol itself, and the DUP therefore want to overturn the regulation.