Brian Feeney. Irish News. Belfast. Wednesday, March 20, 2019 
 

It’s been evident for some years now that several senior Conservatives are opposed to the Good Friday Agreement and that many in the party would be happy to see it collapse.

As long as eighteen years ago Michael Gove wrote an article deploring the agreement as a capitulation by Tony Blair.

More recently, others like former proconsul Owen Paterson [NI secretary of state] have been explicit about the agreement being an obstacle to his obsessive desire to leave the EU and return to an imaginary British golden age. Another former proconsul, Theresa Villiers, judging by her remarks about the Border, either doesn’t understand the GFA or would be happy to see its demise. Given her general cluelessness when supposedly responsible for this place, it’s more likely that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

In the case of Theresa May, well you can judge for yourself. She repeatedly harps on about ‘no hard Border,’ which it looks like she’s doing her damnedest to deliver. Yet she has never explicitly extolled any virtue in the GFA. She daren’t do that in case she offends the DUP, also opponents of the GFA. So the agreement is withering on the vine. If it were a patient in hospital, it would be on life support. Certainly Theresa May and the Conservatives would not bring that patient into intensive care.

Last week, in a futile effort to bring the DUP on side to support her doomed Withdrawal Agreement, she promised, during the debate on her second attempt to push it through, legislation to give a northern executive control over implementation of the backstop or alternatively the ability to extend a transition period after a trade deal. More ominously she also promised legislation, ‘to prohibit any expansion of north-south cooperation through the Withdrawal Agreement. That will remain a matter for the NI assembly and executive…’. This is a crude attempt to prevent the north staying in regulatory alignment with the EU, in other words to subvert the backstop. Now, fortunately any such arrangements would require cross-community agreement so there is as much chance of that happening as for the DUP to agree that the earth is round.

More importantly, it means that, despite her fine words, May is happy to introduce a hard Border through the back door to please the DUP. The DUP immediately rejected her promises as meaningless because they knew cross-community support wouldn’t be forthcoming, but the crucial point is that May was prepared to make the promise in complete disregard of the GFA and the welfare of people north and south.

There’ll be a lot more of this as the DUP seek to become involved in any trade talks after Brexit to prevent the British throwing them under a bus. These will go on for years, obviously for as long as this chaotic, right-wing menagerie of ministers lasts. However, as long as May uses the DUP suckers as a crutch, the GFA is in danger. Parts of it, like the British-Irish Inter-Governmental Conference have already fallen into disuse. May has done nothing to even try to resurrect the assembly and Gove said last week that in the event of no deal there would have to be direct rule.

Most outrageous is May’s flouting of the requirement for the British government to act with ‘rigorous impartiality’ between the two communities here. It’s self-evident that if she caves in on a daily basis to representatives of one community she’s in breach of the GFA. Everything she has done which has led to the slow but sure sidelining of the GFA and nationalists has been to advance the aims of unionists, exactly what the GFA was designed to prevent. The idea that Sinn Féin MPs attending Westminster would make the slightest difference is laughable when she doggedly ignores the Remainers in her own party so that three of them have resigned and joined The Independent Group and a fourth has left the party.

In more ways than one, Ireland is collateral damage in the catastrophe that is Brexit. The long term outlook is grim because despite the crazy behaviour of May and her disintegrating government she’s still six points ahead in the polls.