DUP threats on Brexit protocol ‘won’t make a damn bit of difference,’ blast Northern Irish rivals

BELFAST — Other parties in Northern Ireland’s unraveling administration have dismissed the Democratic Unionists’ threat to wreck power-sharing as a politically impotent stunt that won’t alter Brexit protocol negotiations between London and Brussels.

On Thursday, the DUP fulfilled a long-threatened move to withdraw from the first minister’s post atop the Northern Ireland Executive, a five-party coalition meant to promote compromise between the country’s British unionist and Irish nationalist blocs.

DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson billed Paul Givan’s resignation as an essential shot across the bows of U.K. and EU negotiators. He warned of a deepening political crisis in Belfast if the European Union didn’t permit British goods to arrive in Northern Ireland without regulatory restrictions, an impossibility under the terms of the protocol.

“I have withdrawn the first minister on the basis that the protocol issues have not been addressed, despite clear commitments and promises given by the prime minister [Boris Johnson] that they would be addressed,” Donaldson told BBC radio in Belfast. “Clearly if the protocol issues are not resolved by the time of the election, then of course it is difficult for us to form a government.”

Other party leaders committed to cooperating in government with the DUP branded Donaldson’s demands as delusional.

They said Givan’s withdrawal, just three months before a long-awaited May 5 election, was designed to whip up anti-protocol sentiment in short-term pursuit of unionist votes — but wouldn’t tilt the outcome of ongoing U.K.-EU talks on reforming how the protocol is enforced at Northern Irish ports.

“It won’t make a damn bit of difference to those negotiations,” said Colum Eastwood, leader of the moderate Social Democratic and Labour Party, which competes with Sinn Féin for Irish nationalist votes.

He suggested that Brussels negotiators must be looking on in bemusement as the DUP voluntarily retreats from leadership positions.

“Jeffrey has been standing with a gun to his own head saying: If you don’t give me what I want, I’ll shoot. And now he’s shot,” Eastwood said, adding: “It’s a farce.”

Northern Ireland Justice Minister Naomi Long, who leads the middle-of-the-road Alliance Party, agreed that “pulling down the Executive doesn’t make one iota of difference to negotiations happening between the U.K. and the EU.”

“I don’t think Boris Johnson really cares whether there’s an administration in Northern Ireland. At a personal level I don’t think he really cares about anything but his own survival,” said Long, whose party, like the SDLP and Sinn Féin, campaigned against Brexit and support the protocol.

Under previous power-sharing rules, Givan’s resignation from the top power-sharing post could have triggered the collapse of the entire Executive within a week. That rule, designed to focus minds, left Northern Ireland without an administration and in the governing hands of senior civil servants from 2017 to early 2020.

To manage this crisis, the British government intends to apply rules that have yet to pass Parliament fully, although its power-sharing reform bill is supposed to receive royal assent to become law next week — with a retroactive clause added that can be applied to Givan’s exit.

This new rulebook means other Executive ministers can stay in office through the upcoming election, though with heavily restricted decision-making powers that means there’s little power to share.

But Belfast commentator Newton Emerson observed that the new rules also create a potentially awful vista in which the DUP keeps blocking the formation of any new Executive, as Donaldson has warned could happen.

He said in a tweet that the DUP’s current veto on government formation as the largest unionist party might require multiple elections “until the party causing the obstruction changes its mind or shrinks to irrelevance.”