Opinion

Newton Emerson: DUP knows it has to accept Theresa May's deal or face no deal

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson writes a twice-weekly column for The Irish News and is a regular commentator on current affairs on radio and television.

Newton Emerson
Newton Emerson Newton Emerson

Theresa May’s Brexit strategy is to run down the clock and dare MPs into backing her deal or no deal. In the meantime, a trip to Northern Ireland filled two days of the diary nicely. May’s main speech in Belfast left the audience frustrated but it was not without notable content. A promise to review the immigration rules for Irish-only identifying citizens raised the larger concern of Brexit, Irish citizenship and the Good Friday Agreement. This is potentially a far worse problem than matters of trade, yet it should also be far easier to solve. Perhaps steps in that direction will now be taken.

May also recommitted herself to the backstop, despite last week’s Westminster vote to replace it. But then of course she did - because she is just running down the clock.

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The first time the DUP dealt with May and the backstop, in December 2017, a party source famously said: “This is a battle of who blinks first, and we’ve ripped off our eyelids.”

Fourteen months later, the DUP can no longer pretend it is winning a staring contest with the Maybot. Leader Arlene Foster is still going through the motions of demanding the backstop be scrapped but this call has no credibility and only Sammy Wilson is still making it without caveats. A request by the DUP for discussions with the Irish government had a ring of desperate deflection and was batted away by Dublin. Privately, the DUP accepts it must choose May’s deal over no deal and can only hold out at this stage for fudge. The problem is that it has backed itself into such a corner on the backstop it is significantly increasing the risk of no deal - and admitting that remains a blink too far.

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The DUP-Dublin talks request was a bit of a mess all round. The DUP has snubbed every meeting of the all-Ireland Brexit forum set up by former Taoiseach Enda Kenny in 2016. Strictly speaking, such a forum should have been established by consensus via the North-South Ministerial Council. However, the reason Arlene Foster gave for absenting herself was that she had “better things to do” than be “a lone voice amongst a whole lot of remoaners.”

The Irish government said this week it would meet the DUP but that meant it had to meet every other party in Northern Ireland, as all discussions must be inclusive. It added it would not discuss anything that might be considered a Brexit negotiation because that is a matter between the UK and the European Commission. So what have the meetings of the all-Ireland Brexit forum been about?

The abiding impression left by everyone’s sophistry is that they should just meet each other when they can.

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It is not just paramilitaries who enjoy the leeway of the law in Northern Ireland.

The PSNI conducted a pre-planned search of a Catholic church graveyard outside Dungiven prior to the arrival of two families of travellers numbering 200 people.

Among the items found were two loaded shotguns, ammunition, knives and liquid believed to be acid. A mass brawl then occurred in front of a heavy police presence. Yet not a single arrest was made. Even east Belfast loyalists are put through the inconvenience of being arrested then released without charge.

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A strangulated story has appeared in print and on air warning of Brexit “travel fears” for thousands of pupils who cross the border each day to school.

There is no prospect of these journeys being interrupted by border checks. The real fear turns out to be post-Brexit bureaucracy exposing ‘grannying’, where families living on one side of the border give a false address on the other.

The Belfast Telegraph coyly described this practice as “unauthorised” - a better term would be unlawful. One former grammar principal told the paper that if pupils provide proof of address “it is not the school’s place to go around investigating if the child actually resides there or not.”

In fact, principals and boards of governors have a clear duty to verify proofs of address, as set out in detailed guidance from the Department of Education.

Is the continuance of cross-border dodges a reasonable test for Brexit?

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The British government is outraged at the European Council - the EU’s body of member state leaders - for adding a footnote to draft Brexit legislation describing Gibraltar as “a colony”.

However, it could have been worse. When the legislation passed earlier through the European Parliament, Sinn Féin MEPs tried unsuccessfully to have every instance of “Northern Ireland” changed to “North of Ireland”.

newton@irishnews.com