Owen Polley: The Northern Ireland Protocol has not been resolved yet the DUP is already haggling over money

To that depressing list, we must surely add the events of last week, when the DUP appeared to join Sinn Fein in an attempted shakedown of the Westminster government for more cash, linked to restoring Stormont.

According to Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the negotiation over funding at Hillsborough Castle was, “distinct from our discussions with the government regarding the NI Protocol / Windsor Framework”.

The DUP’s deputy leader, Gavin Robinson MP, though, described it as a ‘parallel’ process.

That implied that it was of comparable importance, or even equally justified. An undertone that not only risked downplaying the seriousness of the Irish Sea border, but evoked all the exceptionalism and entitlement that have always undermined Northern Irish unionism at its worst.

The protocol, as entrenched by the Windsor Framework, is without rival the most serious challenge to Northern Ireland and its place in the UK.

Last week, figures from NISRA confirmed that we are already buying significantly less from Great Britain and more from the Republic of Ireland than before it was implemented.

That, of course, is likely to have a negative effect on our prosperity and the competitiveness of our businesses. The University of Ulster’s senior economist, Dr Esmond Birnie, explained that the data was “strongly suggestive of… trade diversion ... To the extent that those are higher cost suppliers there is a hit to the economy overall”.

In addition, the latest figures on manufacturing showed that industrial production had fallen for a third quarter in a row. The framework is certainly not delivering a boost to the more productive sectors of our economy.

Not that these implications for our prosperity are even the most serious failings of the Irish Sea border. Its worst effects are linked to our constitutional position.

The framework is not fully implemented yet and more goods will be subjected to its requirements in 2024 and 2025. Last week, Dr Birnie suggested that the figures showed our integration with the wider UK economy was already ‘unravelling’. That process will surely accelerate, as the sea border becomes more permanent and serious.

That means that prices will rise faster than they otherwise would, but it also makes it likely the texture of daily life here will become less like that in the rest of Britain and more like the Republic of Ireland. The balance of our business and political concerns will tilt ever further toward Dublin and Brussels, and away from London.

The DUP’s negotiations about these problems remain, formally at least, unresolved, but the party already looks to be haggling for extra money. Rather than suggest that the government’s offer, which was claimed to be worth £2.5 billion, was irrelevant until issues with the Union were addressed first, the party became involved in what seemed like a financial negotiation. At the weekend, Sir Jeffrey even used his members’ email to claim that the government must deliver ‘much more’ on Northern Ireland’s funding model.

Even if the parallel strands are genuinely separate, the unseemly financial wrangle is cross-contaminating the constitutional discussion about the protocol.

On that constitutional theme, the prime minister, in the House of Commons last week, claimed that he was prepared to legislate to protect Northern Ireland’s place in the UK internal market. Is that promise likely to be worth anything?

Previously, in this column, I pointed out that the Internal Market Act already contained provisions designed to achieve this aim. That legislation was initially stronger, but the then secretary of state Brandon Lewis decided to tell the House of Commons that the original bill would “break international law in a specific and limited way”.

That created outrage and the law was defeated in the House of Lords, before being amended into its current form.

It is stretching credulity to claim that Rishi Sunak will offer changes that both maintain the basic architecture of the Windsor Framework and remove the Irish Sea border successfully. If the legislation he proposes is meaningful, then it will cause more controversy. The EU and its proxies will again claim that the government is trying to overwrite an international agreement with Brussels.

The prime minister said that a new law could be passed ‘at pace’, but the Conservatives have already failed to deliver at least two pieces of legislation – the original Internal Market Bill and the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill – that threatened to take unilateral action on some of the sea border’s problems. It’s not certain that Sunak will even lead the Tories next year, never mind being able to guide the kind of law that is needed quickly through parliament.

Last week, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson implied that his party would soon make a decision on restoring Stormont and for that reason Its party officers met on Friday to consider its options.

The argument about whether or not the DUP’s boycott is damaging the Union, or might start to, is complicated. But the fact that the protocol undermined our place in the UK and will continue to do so stands above that discussion. It effectively made us a constitutional hybrid, more than ever a place apart within our own nation, with a virus that will forever eat away at our British status.

If Stormont returns, that will remain the situation that unionist parties have to wrestle with, try to contain and attempt to reverse.

More taxpayers’ money or comforting words in legislation should never be allowed to distract from that task or hide that reality.