Hated Brexit deal needs buy-in from ‘all sides’ warns Boris Johnson as talks stall

Brexit: O’Neill discusses Northern Ireland’s place in the UK

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The Prime Minister, speaking about the Northern Ireland Protocol, said “all sides” need to support the deal. On May 5, Northern Ireland holds its Stormont election, where pro-EU Irish nationalist Sinn Féin party could win the most seats.

Speaking in the House of Commons on Wednesday (April 27), the Prime Minister said there is an economic cost to the Protocol, which is turning into a political problem.

He said the Government must rectify the issue before it undermines the Good Friday agreement.

Mr Johnson said: “It’s vital that the arrangements that we have in Northern Ireland command the support of all sides.”

He added that the so-called Northern Ireland protocol is “now turning into a political problem” and there’s an “imbalance of sentiment” that needs to be rectified.

Meanwhile, Lord David Frost said the Northern Ireland Protocol has put the Belfast Agreement “on life support”.

Accusing the EU of treating his negotiating team as “the supplicant representatives of a renegade province”, the former Brexit secretary said the Government had faced the choice of accepting the protocol or walking away and failing to deliver Brexit.

He said: “At that point we would have seen, at best, a second referendum, quite possibly Brexit taken off the agenda for good, and who knows what consequences in our domestic politics.”

Lord Frost added that the protocol was only ever intended to be temporary and he had assumed it would last only until Stormont voted in 2024 on whether to keep the accord.

Lord Frost said: “I expected that we would do so much domestic reform and change within Great Britain between 2020 and 2024 that it would be self-evidently attractive to Northern Ireland to end the protocol and put some other arrangements in place.”

He said the EU’s “ham-fisted” proposal to ban exports of vaccines across the border into Northern Ireland in January last year had “destroyed” unionist consent and rendered the protocol unworkable.

The Brexit secretary added: “The strains it is causing are actively damaging the Belfast Agreement.

“It is therefore surely obvious, indeed it is an inescapable logical conclusion, that the protocol can’t be operated as it stands. It has to be renegotiated or removed.”

The Government has, however, refused to say whether the Queen’s Speech on May 10 would include legislation to unilaterally suspend the Protocol if a negotiated solution with the EU and Ireland did not emerge.

The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “We do want to move as quickly as possible. We recognise there is still a lot more work to do.

“It remains our view that negotiated settlement would be the right approach.”

But the spokesman added: “We don’t rule out taking further steps if solutions cannot be found.”

It comes after a LucidTalk poll last month showed Sinn Féin as on track to become the largest party in Stormont for the first time.

Sinn Féin is leading on 26 percent, with the DUP at 19 percent and the Alliance Party on 16 percent.

LucidTalk said 1,616 responses were used in the final weighted poll.

The DUP has repeatedly refused to say if it would accept filling the role of deputy first minister if pushed into second place by Sinn Féin.

If the DUP were the second largest party after the election, but refused to put forward someone for the deputy first minister position, the Northern Irish executive could not function.

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