Little is being said about David Trimble’s view on the harm done to the Belfast Agreement by the Northern Ireland Protocol
The great and the good have been piling in to praise David Trimble’s achievements in negotiating the 1998 Agreement, then implementing it in the face of IRA duplicity.
Quite right — although the politicians from London and Dublin neglect how their governments betrayed him by offering IRA fugitive offenders an effective amnesty, and by failing to insist on decommissioning.
Their plaudits ignore his recent warnings about the damage which the Northern Ireland Protocol is doing to the agreement and to unionist support for it.
Jim Allister and Jeffrey Donaldson have referred to this in their statements, but the other parties, celebrity politicians and proponents of the ‘peace process’ have not.
They admire Lord Trimble’s work only when it matches their own agendas.
Lord Trimble joined Jim Allister and others in the 2021 legal challenge to the protocol, which is still winding its way through the courts.
He also set out his views in a number of articles, including ‘Ditch the Protocol’ in a collection of essays The Idea of the Union.
The headline to the 1998 Agreement assured the electorate that it would be wrong to make any change in the status of Northern Ireland save with the consent of the majority of its people.
Trimble wrote: “That is why I feel betrayed personally by the Northern Ireland Protocol, and it is also why the unionist population is so incensed at its imposition. The Protocol rips the very heart out of the Agreement.”
The protocol subjects Northern Ireland to EU regulations without any input or oversight from local elected representatives.
This is the basis for the obsessionally disruptive Irish Sea border controls which the EU is trying to make even more oppressive.
Trimble offered a pragmatic way forward: the UK would set up a system of mutual enforcement such that firms selling goods to the Republic would have to comply with EU regulations.
But it appears that Brussels is not interested in a simple effective solution.
• Dr WB Smith, Belfast ( www.williambeattiesmith.com ). Dr Smith is co-editor, The Idea of the Union, available from Blackstaff Press