NI Dec 22 Assembly Election

Westminster have bigger fish to fry than NI so we won’t get far there accept when we hold balance of power and the DUP completely screwed that up last time.

oh I agree Leo is not the sole problem. Republicans, nationalists, Irish government, etc played on the concern of violence if there was checks on the island to try and put Uk in a position where they would accept a soft brexit fudge.

this could be easily sorted if Leo etc wasn’t using NI peace as a negotiating tool.

what did you honestly think of loyalist posters last week stating that ‘violence is now a real possibility’? And rather than be disingenuous laying a trap, let me be completely open - they are repeating the words of Leo only the other way around

I think if they think violence is a real possibility then they should stop pissing around for political effect and start demanding that Westminster takes the steps it needs to take to fix the problem it has created.

If "Westminster have bigger fish to fry" they need to accept that the Union is in trouble, and the trouble comes from Westminister, not Brussels. The EU not only also has bigger fish to fry; it's much less well-positioned to fix this problem. The Brexiters who run the UK despise Ulster and Ulster unionism; Ulster unionists are afraid to call that out and demand that it changes; what exactly do you think the EU can do to fix that problem for you?

It was a good five years ago, well before the NI Protocol was thought of, when one commentator said (in the context of the Joint Declaration) something like "Obviously, Westminster ought to honour the promises it makes to NI, and the EU would very much prefer that it did. But in the end the EU can't; it has neither the power nor the right to do so." And I think that's still the position today.

And to you too downcow.

You have serious problems imo with the succinct and convincing posts 452 and 454 above.

The title of the thread seemed sensible at the time, but as 2022 passes into history so does the expected 2022 election.

I posted in this thread that I thought there was a very real chance now that there would never again be an election to the gfa institutions. Here is a very soft moderate but well-informed unionist saying likewise. A good realistic piece

I don’t disagree with you there breezy. That’s been the case with regard to the elite in Westminster for 100 years.

Read breezys post again. Put politely, you could reword to say, that where the eu imposed checks are positioned in relation to ni are far down the UKs current priority list.

I am agreeing with that

but Leo etc has taken advantage of that situation with zero regard for fairness or for peace on this island. That’s why there is angst being directed at Dublin. If the Irish gov cared about peace in ni or the gfa then they would not have acted for one community and against the other.

they have created a monster. This is going to be a very long battle but our community is up for it because it is more important to our community than those in GB, Ireland, EU, USA etc. Our community is the cornered rat in this situation. Hence the polls showing that the parties taking a strong stance on a protocol overhaul are destined to improve at next election.

many posters on here have consistently told me we would achieve nothing re changes. The facts demonstrate otherwise. If unionists had stayed quiet and accepted the injustice then the protocol would be implemented. Instead we have even the EU now extending grace periods to appease unionists.

we are already a very long way from what posters said would be implemented and that we should just ‘suck it up’

i expect something close to this below to be agreed by eu in the coming weeks - and that’s just one wee battle won in the long war

These are not "eu-imposed checks", downcow. They are Brexit-imposed checks; the EU's preference was always not to have them. And their location was not always "far down the UK's priority list"; as I've already pointed out, the UK wouldn't ratify the Withdrawal Agreement until it got the NI Protocol, placing the checks where the UK wanted them.

Their posturing with the NI Protocol Bill notwithstanding, it may be the case now that Westminster doesn't care greatly about getting the checks moved from where it has had them placed. But this still wouldn't be a reason for Loyalists to protest in Dublin. If London doesn't care, and the British citizens most affected by this can't make London care, then I don't see how Dublin is expected to make London care. And the irony of Loyalists looking to Dublin to protect them from the disdain of the Westminster establishment cannot go unnoticed. Loyalists would normally be appalled at the idea of Dublin purporting to dictate the UK's internal trading arrangements, but now they are demanding that Dublin should do precisely that?

Seriously, this doesn't look like an attempt to pressure Dublin to pressure London to treat Unionists decently; it looks like an attempt to pretend that Dublin is responsible for what London has done, because acknowledging the truth of the matter is (a) embarrassing, given that the same Loyalists backed London to the hilt on the long march to the NI Protocol and (b) scary, because saying out loud that London has nothing but disdain for the Union has implications that even the most one-eyed Loyalist cannot ignore for long.

As for the "long battle", the chances of victory are limited if you try to conduct the battle without naming or directly attacking the enemy, and if all your manoeuvres are conducted in Dublin, well away from the front. The bones of the solution you propose have been on the table for a long time; the main obstacles to progress being (a) the inability or unwillingness of the UK to provide real-time customs data; (b) the insistence of at least some in the UK on rejecting any compromise which involved accepting the CJEU jurisdiction which the UK explicitly accepted three years ago; and (c) the sustained efforts f the UK to destroy the trust that would be needed for an agreement like this to work. None of these are obstacles which Dublin can or ever could remove. Loyalists who are not interested in tackling these problems are, as I say, not really interested in modifying the protocol; they just want to posture about which while being complicit in its continuation.

Just to be clear, that was not an acceptable solution I posted - it may be a stop along the way.

I have condemned Leo’s disregard for the gfa and unionists on here many times. So praise where praise is due.

he will have thrown some regular posters on here into panic as he has just said the dreaded word that they said unionists would never bring unto the table.

“The protocol is not being fully implemented and yet it is still working. I think that demonstrates there is some room for further flexibility, for CHANGES that hopefully will make it acceptable to all sides,” said Varadkar,

we’ve got to this point quicker than I thought we would

I don’t want to waste my energy search through threads, but it is without question that o was told many times categorically that there would be no changes to the protocol. I was told there are flexibilities built into it which could be used providing the Uk did not introduce bills to block or unilaterally extend grace periods.

leo has used a very important word (changes) that I think you will struggle to find him or any eu rep using before. That’s important and to be welcomed. Thank you Leo.

So not the community of the people of NI, who voted against Brexit .

Do you accept that what the DUP are looking for is not supported by the majority of people in NI?

You are missing the point that gfa done away with majority rule.

we all also know that a large section including alliance are floating in the middle and will just agree with whatever eu and Uk agree. So should the govs agree what dup want then the majority would support that. Life is never as black and white as you would like

Clearly international agreements are not binding eg gfa. The agreement was for cross community consent which has not been upheld on the jurisdiction given to the eu foreign power.

sf wanted, and got the agreement that the fmdfm office would be joint. Listen to their language now that they hold the most seats - seems it wasn’t binding.

Another day another admission. I have been told continuously on here that Leo had nothing to do with creating Irish Sea checks. Seems he has said himself today that he helped create to look after nationalists in ni (I haven’t seen the quote yet, but if true, another incredible admission.

I wonder would posters on here retract their claims that Leo had nothing to do with it and that unionists should not direct their anger at the south?

Most of the people braying about the GFA having been violated are people who never accepted the GFA in the first place, and not a few of them seem to be people who have never read the GFA or who, at least, are aiming their rhetoric at an audience that has never read it. Awkwardly for them, the UK's own courts have consistently held that the NI Protocol does not breach the GFA.

If you can link to one of the "continuous" posts here in which you are told that Varadkar had "nothing to do" with creating Irish Sea checks, that would be helpful. If you can't, well, we'll draw our own conclusions. What you have been told here, more than once, is that the NI Protocol was a UK ask (and, to be fair to you, I don't think you have ever explicitly denied this; you just seem reluctant to confront its implications). The UK proposed the bones of what became the Protocol in a letter to the Commission on 2 October 2019. After meetign Johnson a week later, Varadkar did back the UK's ask, which may have played some role in getting the EU to accept it. Reportedly, Varadkar's particular contribution was the idea of a clause allowing the NI Assembly to terminate the application of the Protocol. (That can't happen, of course, if there's no NI Assembly.)

And I point, once again, to the incongruity of loyalists protesting at the failure of the Irish government to prevent the UK government from regulating the affairs of the UK as it thinks best. It is impossible to take these protests seriously, or to think that loyalists themselves seem them as anything more than posturing to distract attention from realities they would rather not confront.

Leaving to one side the issue of whether the EU's position has or has not changed, if you think any change happened because Unionists wouldn't "suck it up" you are frankly delusional.

You've said yourself that Westminster doesn't care what Unionists say or do - they have bigger fish to fry. But if Westminster doesn't care, why in God's name would Brussels? The state of the UK union is absolutely not their business, and they certainly won't alter their interests or objectives in an attempt to influence it; why would they? Their ambition has always been much more limited; to ensure that Brexit doesn't destabilise the GFA by triggering a hard border in Ireland.

(You might think that they should also aim to ensure that Brexit doesn't destabilise the GFA by triggering a hard border in the UK. But they EU are nothing if not realists; a hard border within the UK is a domestic matter for the UK, a third country and not a member state. There isn't a great deal the EU can do to prevent the UK from setting up an internal border if that's how it chooses to avoid a hard border with the EU, and the EU knows this. God knows they tried that, but the UK wasn't having it. They are not gong to jeopardise their own interests and objectives in a fruitless attempt to interfere in the UK's domestic choices. The EU doesn't have a magic wand it can wave for you on this issue, downcow.)

So, if the EU doesn't change its position in response to Loyalist coffin-posturing, what does it change its position in response to? You already know the answer to this — every person of ordinary common sense knows it. The EU responds to their counterparties in this relationship; the UK government. If they are signally a willingness to make a fresh deal with the UK, that is because they think, or at least hope, that the UK is finally ready for the negotiations and commitments which that would involve.