Letter: Alliance's claims on economic growth from the Northern Ireland Protocol are unchecked and unchallenged
A letter from Colin Berry:
David Honeyford’s recent claims that “dual market access” and “all-island” trade arrangements have been the primary catalysts for Northern Ireland’s GDP growth are deeply questionable.
They lack economic and policy literacy that too often goes unchecked, and, more troublingly, unchallenged, within Stormont.
The publication of the NI Composite Economic Index for Q3 2025 on January 16 makes this particularly evident.
The data show that the one per cent GDP increase in Q3 was driven predominantly by the domestic economy: services contributed 0.6 per cent, construction 0.3 per cent, and production just 0.1 per cent.
This raises an obvious question: which chapters of the Windsor Framework or the Northern Ireland Protocol does Mr Honeyford believe directly govern services and construction?
The answer, of course, is that they largely do not.
The notion that “trade” alone is boosting economic growth is, at best, hollow. It conveniently ignores the far more significant role played by domestic economic activity.
If anything, it is more likely that Mr Honeyford and his party would prefer to anchor Northern Ireland to the EU’s AI regulatory framework, rather than pursue a more agile strategy, one that shifts the services sector away from low-value back-office functions vulnerable to globalisation, and towards higher-value roles built on automation, intellectual property creation, and innovation rooted in the local economy.
This is not an abstract concern. The trade body techUK has made clear its preference for the UK’s existing approach to AI regulation.
If Northern Ireland is serious about maximising growth in this space, it should be doubling down on divergence from the more restrictive EU framework in areas such as artificial intelligence and automation, not binding itself ever more tightly to it.
That such outlandish claims about economic growth can persist without scrutiny exposes not only a failure within unionism to dismantle weak arguments, but a deeper structural problem within the Stormont system itself.
Voters are routinely denied meaningful mechanisms to scrutinise, penalise, or remove MLAs and parties from power, many of whom shape policy in areas far removed from their own seniority and experience of the private sector. Until that accountability deficit is addressed, ill-founded economic narratives will continue to flourish, largely unchallenged, to the detriment of the taxpayer in the province.
Colin Berry, Comber