Sir, – It is no surprise to those of us who know the North that the disastrous blunder by the European Commission in seeming to override the Northern Ireland protocol in order to ban vaccine exports from the EU has led to loyalist threats to workers in Belfast and Larne ports. The dangerous mood of loyalism has been apparent for the past month since the protocol began to be implemented.
PSNI Assistant Chief Constable Mark McEwan warned the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee in Westminster last week that it was picking up intelligence of intense anger at grassroots level in that community.
The incoherence of that angry mood, which has been growing since it became apparent that the UK government was intent on implementing the protocol as part of the price for a post-Brexit trade deal, thus raising obstacles to the movement of British imports into the North, does not make it any less potentially deadly. Northern Ireland Office officials went so far as to meet with the paramilitary umbrella group, the Loyalist Communities Council, recently to try to calm things down.
All that was happening before the reckless stance taken by the European Commission last Friday. Its willingness to impose a hard border on the island of Ireland, although quickly reversed after representations by the Irish and British governments, provided proof of what unionists have always believed, that EU policy on the Border never had an economic logic, but had been driven by the Irish Government’s wish to annex Northern Ireland – first as an economic unit, then as a political one. Does this make sense? Maybe not, but then it doesn’t have to for the belief to take hold in the paranoid world of Ulster loyalism.
People who know the community well say that loyalists were very impressed by the Capitol riot in Washington last month, and the potential a disruptive act of that kind has for seizing the headlines. Covid restrictions are inhibiting street protests or rallies, and we can all feel relieved about that. There may be no great show of strength at Belfast City Hall, as there was in the flags protest in 2012-2013, but the situation remains unstable, and the EU, which hitherto placed such a premium on the Northern Irish peace process, has just dealt it a blow. – Yours, etc,
ANDY POLLAK,
Dublin 6;
PAUL NOLAN,
Belfast.