The UK-EU trade deal is welcome, but it is no cause for celebration for Northern Ireland — rather, it is the least bad option

The announcement of a trade deal between the United Kingdom and the European Union is good news for Northern Ireland.

It is not, however, cause for celebration.

Some purist Brexiteers think that a no deal exit would have been best, because it would have represented a complete break from Brussels.

This might have been so for England, but a failure to reach an arrangement with the UK’s biggest trading partner when Britain leaves the transition period six days from now would have caused serious economic disruption. It would have caused even greater political upheaval.

Nationalists in Scotland and Northern Ireland would have reacted with utter fury, and in the latter case that invariably leads to a fresh raft of concessions from London.

The concessions have already been huge. The NI Protocol kicks if there is a deal or not. Had there not been one, the UK-EU rupture would have been all the greater — and this Province would have been on the EU side of it.

It is a long story as to how we ended up this situation, ranging from all the business groups (CBI to UFU) backing the backstop, which enshrined the idea that there must be no change at all at the land border (making a border with Great Britain inevitable), to the unionist failure to push for a softer Norway option, to the Tory failure to stand by NI.

For now NI can only study the detail of what Boris Johnson has agreed with the EU, then try to make the best of it.

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