Letter: The danger for unionists in returning to Stormont

Immense pressure is being put on unionists to return to power sharing and I don’t doubt the sincerity of any fellow unionists who are tempted to do so.

The difficultly however with saying NI can’t leave the EU on the same terms as the rest of the UK is that we have no idea how it will evolve in future.

It may seem to some unionists like we just have to make the best of it but we could be stuck with this for years or decades. If Britain starts to diverge from the EU over time, more and more issues may arise that we can’t even envisage yet that will create the temptation to keep treating NI more and more like a foreign country because that’s how these problems have been gotten around in the past.

There is a real danger that the precedent the Conservatives have set will be the go to plan anytime these problems arise. We have already seen speculation around the potential difficulties with having NI under European law could have in terms of how it could effect immigration policy.

If we allow NI to be treated differently on trade and law now it may seem like a small technical issue at present but it runs the risk of what starts as treating NI goods as foreign will eventually lead to NI people being treated as foreign.

To my mind there is only one resolution to the impasse. NI should have a border poll to decide its future for the next 20 years. If NI wishes to remain in the UK for the time being then the Irish Sea Border is incompatible with that and a Sinn Fein first minister can prove how much they believe health, public sector pay etc should be above petty unionist Politics around the constitution by implementing the protocol on an Irish Land Border.

If a border poll decides people want all Ireland unification then is that not the direction of travel being imposed undemocratically anyway. What have unionists to lose?

Mr RG McDowell, Belfast BT5