Editorial: The border in the Irish Sea has not as claimed been removed

​The London-DUP deal to restore Stormont is called Safeguarding the Union.

Such naming is a symbolic advance on the New Decade New Approach deal to return Stormont, after the three-year Sinn Fein collapse, in which the Northern Ireland Secretary Julian Smith tore up strand one to let one of the greenest of Irish ministers Simon Coveney preside over an agreement that delved deep into matters such as nurses’ pay – which ought to be the domain of the NI parties.

With almost everyone hailing the latest return of Stormont, it might sound sour to hark back to 2020, but a Conservative and Unionist government’s neutrality then destroyed a key 1998 gain for unionists. Now there is growing acceptance in London that the neutral approach towards the Republic has failed. Rishi Sunak has again hit back at Ireland’s hypocritical legacy action. Yesterday’s deal specifies that the UK isn’t neutral on the Union, a welcome retreat from cross-party naivete about the crisis facing unionism.

It is also good that the government has tried to improve the Windsor Framework after what is now widely seen as overblown claims about its achievements a year ago. But Sir Jeffrey Donaldson is saying that the Irish Sea border has been removed. It hasn’t.

Sir Jeffrey faced bad options – including punishment for unionists if he stayed out of Stormont. We have repeatedly contrasted that extreme pressure with the absence of any on the pro IRA party during its long collapse. But while there are many culprits in the saga in which NI ended up on one side of a UK-EU trade divide, the fact is that it did and remains so even if checks are further diminished. The government now claims that NI is not in the EU single market for goods. It also points out that most NI economic life, tax, currency etc, is still in UK. But that is different to which market we are in, and doesn’t negate the fact of a trade barrier, albeit disguised.