An extra grace period for the implementation of the Irish Sea border will just be a sticking plaster

It seems in more recent years to have happened again and again with Britain.

Something is agreed that should not have been agreed. Then there is denial that it has been agreed.

Then, when the scale of what has been agreed becomes impossible to ignore, there is a scramble to act as if it hasn’t been agreed or to mitigate what has been agreed.

Finally, what has been agreed is implemented.

It happened in the 2014 Stormont House Agreement, when the UK made concessions it should not have made on legacy (the UK should not be cowed if local parties make mistakes, but should maintain its own red lines). When London finally retreated from the legacy blunder last March, it then allowed a vacuum to develop, which has been filled by the various voices who want to get that bad deal back on track.

This same sequence of agreement, then regret, also happened with the Irish border backstop that Theresa May agreed in December 2017.

After initial unionist opposition the then prime minister secured protections for Northern Ireland. But in March of 2018, when the EU published ideas which ignored those protections, she did nothing.

Intermittently Mrs May talked tough about the Union, then in November 2018 published her capitulation to EU-Ireland. After that, to try to get her deal passed, much hope was put in legal interpretations and the codicil to the agreement.

And the pattern of deal-regret has happened again, with Boris Johnson’s NI Protocol. These disasters are rooted in a mix of incompetence and weakness. The other party to an agreement with the UK secures binding commitments and, then the UK scrambles to minimise the damage of what has been agreed, such as slow implementation.

That was the sorry sequence yesterday, when London pleaded with the EU for more time on the protocol. Extra time only delays constitutional damage done by Mr Johnson.

The DUP is right that this is a sticking plaster to the border. Soon that party will have to lead a charge for lasting change.

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