Northern Ireland to Frost: Enforce the protocol, don’t fight it

David Frost heard an unusual message from Northern Ireland politicians and business leaders Friday: Quit exaggerating the problems associated with the post-Brexit trade protocol and commit to fully enforcing it.

During a one-day visit to Northern Ireland, Britain’s chief architect of the U.K.’s Withdrawal Agreement with the EU visited Newry, a border town, where businesses are building trade with the Republic of Ireland. The protocol keeps cross-border commerce in the town flowing freely with its EU neighbors.

“Our businesses are broadly happy with the protocol. A lot of them are benefitting from it,” Newry’s chamber of commerce chief, Colm Shannon, told Frost.

And in a Q&A at a Northern Ireland Assembly committee, lawmakers from the Irish nationalist side of the community accused Frost of overstating commercial disruption and feeding the fears of British unionists, who see the protocol’s restrictions on shipments from Britain as a threat to their identity.

“You’re saying that the deal isn’t being implemented as you thought,” the Stormont committee chairman, Colin McGrath, said to Frost across the table. “It’s your deal. If your deal is so shoddy, why did you negotiate it?”

“We believe that the next agreement that you honor will be your first,” Sinn Féin lawmaker Martina Anderson told him.

“People here do not trust you, they do not believe you,” she said, citing a recent poll that showed only 6 percent of Northern Ireland voters trust the British government. “People here want to see the protocol implemented in full. Not everyone, but the majority.”

Unionists took their turn berating Frost from the opposite perspective. They accused him of selling their union with Britain down the river, pushing them economically toward a united Ireland by keeping Northern Ireland subject to EU trade laws.

“How can you tell me that there’s been no constitutional change in the status of Northern Ireland when laws made by foreign powers and overseen by foreign courts will apply here?” said Democratic Unionist Party lawmaker Christopher Stalford. “It’s not, as you say, ‘pretty unusual.’ It’s a constitutional outrage.”

Frost faced yet more criticism from Pat Sheehan, another lawmaker from Sinn Féin, the Irish nationalist party that recently overtook the DUP to become the largest in the Belfast assembly.

He said Frost was wrong to portray most Northern Irish citizens as “up in arms” over the protocol while supermarkets “have full shelves” thanks to partly shifting their supply chains to Irish and EU providers.

Problems “are being completely overblown. The vast majority of businesses and farmers support the protocol,” Sheehan said, adding that export-focused firms were finding “new markets and new opportunities.”

He knocked back one of the U.K. government’s talking points — the risk that a postponed ban on chilled meat from Britain would mean no more English sausages.

“If people can’t get Cumberland sausages here, they’ll certainly be able to get local sausages. That’s good for local businesses here. Would you not agree with me?” he asked Frost.

The lifelong diplomat — who maintained an air of detachment as he stuck to well-worn talking points — agreed with Sheehan that Northern Ireland sausages were “just as good. Obviously that’s not really the point.”

“I’d argue they’re better!” Sheehan shot back.