Opinion

Patrick Murphy: North left with no voice as protocol mayhem looms

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy is an Irish News columnist and former director of Belfast Institute for Further and Higher Education.

British prime minister Boris Johnson with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen. Photo: Aaron Chown/PA Wire.
British prime minister Boris Johnson with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen. Photo: Aaron Chown/PA Wire. British prime minister Boris Johnson with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen. Photo: Aaron Chown/PA Wire.

The nationalist argument that the Northern Ireland Protocol is somehow “good” for us is about to unravel in the real world of harsh reality.

It is now clear that it will impose additional costs for business and the civil service, create confusion within the NHS and add significantly to our spiralling cost of living.

Welcome to a world of impending administrative mayhem.

The people of the north had no voice in the protocol’s design or implementation. However, we will bear the burden of what is effectively a land-grab by the EU, facilitated by Boris Johnson’s focus on a power grab at Westminster.

As has happened for 400 years, competing foreign powers now fuel sectarian division here (not that it needs much fuel). Informed debate has been replaced by persistent nationalist mockery of the DUP, scorning how inept unionists have been at resisting the protocol.

This has merely articulated a strong case against ineptitude, not the protocol itself.

Most of the media coverage has centred on trade. However, a more serious problem stems from the EU’s 2022 Work Programme of 44 new policy objectives, 29 of which will apply to us.

These rules relate to goods including hazardous substances in electronics, detergents, motor vehicle type approval, medicines and EU customs, VAT and excise legislation. Most of these will differ from UK regulations as it develops its own laws.

So we will be governed by two sets of conflicting rules, imposed without consultation or consent, by two opposing foreign powers.

If the UK approves a new drug, for example, we cannot use it here unless the EU approves it within six months. If that happens (and experience shows it is highly likely) our hospitals will be required to implement a British-based NHS system run from London, using Brussels-based pharmaceutical regulations. How do you strategically plan for that?

As the two systems increasingly diverge, how will we train our doctors and pharmacists?

Such conflicting regulations will also affect water management, air quality, plastics pollution, chemicals, climate change, road haulage, marine transport, artificial intelligence and internet shopping.

As a House of Lords committee said this week, too many government departments here have yet to grasp the protocol’s implications. Increased administration will require additional civil servants, diverting funds from frontline services.

The problem stems from a lack of nationalist leadership. Sinn Féin and the SDLP supported the Good Friday Agreement to unite us with Britain. Now they support the protocol to distance us from Britain. Which do they want?

This column has long argued that the north should be an economically neutral zone, trading freely with both the EU and the UK. Instead, Leo Varadkar, Simon Coveney and Dublin’s media ferociously attacked Britain for Brexit, thereby inviting the EU’s land grab.

Sinn Féin and the SDLP joined Dublin’s “Ireland Boys, Hurrah” campaign, advocating a transfer of allegiance from Britain to Brussels, by supporting a protocol which even the EU recognises is significantly unviable (hence its climbdown on several issues).

There is a wonderfully Catholic ethos underlying nationalism’s condemnation of Brexit as being a sin by unionists who now deserve punishment. When unionists complain about something, the stock nationalist reaction is: “It serves them right for supporting Brexit”.

Were those who voted for Brexit (and they were not all unionists) not entitled to vote for their beliefs? If not, why were Sinn Féin entitled to vote for their beliefs in opposing EU membership for over 40 years? So were they wrong all those years, or are they wrong now?

Once again sectarian self interest has left us in a mess. We have no voice in what happens to us. There is no Stormont (not that it matters much). We have no MEPs and 7 of our 18 MPs refuse to attend Westminster.

We are the democratically dispossessed, which means that we have no way of challenging the injustice of what is happening to us. To be ruled by one foreign power is unfortunate. To be ruled by two looks like political carelessness.