Jamie Bryson: Loyalists are working to calm anger over Irish Sea border

They have done this with their purported justification for unilaterally disapplying key safeguards within the Belfast Agreement in order to advance nationalist objectives

The statement of justification provided by the Northern Ireland Office (the same NIO that deny a border in the Irish Sea) is, to be frank, arrant nonsense.

Strand 1 (5) (d) of the Belfast Agreement — which we are told by nationalists has almost the status of a holy writ — is clear in so far as affirming that “key decisions” are to have appropriate safeguards in the form of the cross community consent mechanism. This is given effect in domestic law by Section 42 of the Northern Ireland Act 1998, which allows a Petition of Concern to be lodged in relation to “a matter coming before the Assembly”.

It is hard to imagine more of a “key decision” than whether to imprison Northern Ireland within an economic united Ireland, and plainly the consent vote on the Protocol is “a matter coming before the Assembly”.

It is fundamentally dishonest for the NIO to spin the yarn that the matter is not really devolved, so that is why it is acceptable for them to override the cross-community consent mechanism to the detriment of unionists.

Let us cast our minds back to when the government proposed inserting safeguards for the UK Internal Market within the Internal Market Bill.

There were howls of outrage (we even had Joe Biden meddling) with claims that such a change was inconsistent with the UK-EU treaty and the Belfast Agreement. In short: the very notion that Parliament would disapply a treaty to safeguard the Union was met with mass hysteria.

We were subjected to hysterical outbursts from Sinn Fein, SDLP and Alliance who warned there could be no breach of international law.

Fast forward to December 10 2020 when the secretary of state quietly and unilaterally — without the support of a single elected unionist representative — amended the Northern Ireland Act (yes, it appears the holy writ can be changed without cross community consent), tearing up the obligations in the Belfast Agreement international treaty, I heard no howls of outrage.

The amendment itself makes a mockery of the NIO’s statement to this newspaper; if this is simply not a devolved matter — as the NIO absurdly suggests — and Section 42 therefore does not apply, then why at Schedule 6A paragraph 18 (5) is Section 42 specifically disapplied for this specific vote?

It was only by chance that I spotted this amendment on Sunday whilst doing some other research. Thereafter I very publicly called attention to the matter, yet only the PUP and TUV immediately raised their voices in protest.

And whilst Nigel Dodds and Steve Aiken have quite rightly now joined in, I have yet to hear any meaningful statement from the DUP leader, Arlene Foster.

Does anyone think that Sinn Fein would be silent if the Belfast Agreement were altered to the detriment of nationalism?

Of course not.

In the same vein, does anyone think that a Sinn Fein minister would be building border posts between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland? Yet the DUP continue to acquiesce to the implementation of border posts between Northern Ireland the rest of the United Kingdom.

That is not going unnoticed and if the DUP are serious about resisting this pernicious protocol, then the first step they must take is to frustrate and impede the imposition of the Irish Sea border. The unionist community do not want ‘solutions’ to the protocol, nor to ‘make it work’.

The sole objective is to entirely eradicate it.

The PSNI have now told the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee that there is “growing sentiment and discontent” within the unionist/loyalist community, which may not have fully come to fruition yet due to being “masked somewhat by Covid”.

Ian Paisley MP in the same meeting expressed concern that unionist communities were a “powderkeg”.

That is the reality of the societal difficulties which are flowing from the protocol. The use of the word “growing” by the PSNI outlines that this is something which is going to become more problematic, rather than abate.

The loyalist community are working very hard to calm growing tensions and anger in the face of the betrayal of Northern Ireland. The Loyalist Community Council rightly called for people to “stay calm”.

These efforts to calm tensions are nevertheless not made any easier by the reality that the Irish Sea border was imposed as a reward for the implied threats of nationalist violence which were raised by Sinn Fein, SDLP, Alliance and the Irish government, who outrageously suggested that bombs may return if there was any form of infrastructure between Northern Ireland the Irish Republic.

On January 1 2021 I published ‘Brexit Betrayed’, a book which argued that the route to undermining the Protocol and defending the Union was in the first instance by ensuring the criteria for the triggering of Article 16 was met.

The way by which to ensure that happens is to ensure that the protocol becomes synonymous with political instability; in short, the DUP hold the most potent weapon by which to resist this effort to embed Northern Ireland within an economic United Ireland.

It is they who can — on behalf of the unionist people who elect them — make Stormont unworkable and refuse to continue working the institutions of the Belfast Agreement.

The unilateral amendment of the Northern Ireland Act to the detriment of unionism demonstrates that in reality the Belfast Agreement is nothing more than a roadmap to a united Ireland and the mantra about ‘safeguards’ really means safeguarding nationalist interests; there is no such concern with the unionist community.

I have long argued, and I sincerely hope it is an argument accepted by a growing number of the unionist community, that you can not be pro agreement and pro-Union; the agreement is designed to end the Union.

Therefore, it is illogical for any self-respecting unionist to continue operating the Belfast Agreement institutions, including the North-South bodies.

Why should any unionist pander to those bodies when simultaneously there is a growing blockade of Northern Ireland and the apparently ‘sacrosanct’ Belfast Agreement is torn up (on 10 December 2020) when the needs of nationalists demand it?

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