BELFAST — The Irish border Brexit fight is fixated on the wrong thing.

That’s the message unionists in Northern Ireland would like political leaders in London, Dublin, Brussels and other European capitals to hear.

The border, a key sticking point in the Brexit impasse, is part of the complicated political puzzle of preserving Northern Ireland's peace settlement. But, say Unionists, it is not the only part — and to elevate it above all other considerations puts real strain on the very settlement it is designed to protect.

In order to prevent Brexit from upending the delicate settlement in Northern Ireland, EU negotiators have insisted that any agreement governing the U.K.’s departure must include a cast-iron mechanism to prevent the need for checks on the border between the U.K. nation and the Republic of Ireland to the south.

This “Irish backstop,” as the measure has come to be called, is intended — its advocates say — to safeguard the political balance underpinning the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. At the same time though, Brussels insists on an arrangement that protects the EU’s internal market from goods flooding through the proposed open border unchecked.

Brexit — and the backstop in particular — is now serving to intensify tensions in Northern Ireland as well.

But the truth, warn the region’s British loyalists, is that by focusing on one of the most visual consequences of the conflict — the once-militarized border between north and south — the backstop is aggravating the underlying injury.

While the loyalist voice in the House of Commons has been heard, and May’s deal and the backstop rejected three times, unionist leaders still feel that the substance of their argument has been lost on London, Dublin and Brussels. “What is undermining the Good Friday Agreement is the total ignoring of the unionist point of view,” Nigel Dodds, deputy leader of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, told POLITICO in Belfast.

Hostility to the backstop among Tory MPs and the party's membership is also animating the race to succeed Theresa May as Conservative leader and prime minister. Most candidates are standing on a pledge to renegotiate the backstop. Whether or not is possible, solving the backstop conundrum will be critical to delivering on Brexit.

More seriously, Brexit — and the backstop in particular — is now serving to intensify tensions in Northern Ireland as well. In the elections to the European parliament, the unionist parties expressly sought a mandate to continue their fight against the backstop, while the main nationalist and centrist parties campaigned in favor. The results only served to deepen the division. The DUP emerged claiming validation for its hard-line opposition after topping the poll. And yet a majority of voters overall — 56 percent — backed parties that expressly backed the backstop.

The institutions of power-sharing, the heart of the peace accord, are slowly atrophying after years of disuse. The muscle memory of what is needed to work together is fading.

Violence has returned the region, most notably with the murder of the journalist Lyra McKee by dissident Republicans.

“This place is a potential powder keg in the making,” one Northern Irish political activist said following McKee’s killing. “Westminster doesn’t get it — yet.”

In 1998, when the Good Friday Agreement was signed, ending almost 30 years of violence between Irish nationalists and unionists who want to ensure Northern Ireland remains part of the United Kingdom, nobody foresaw that the U.K. would vote to break away from Brussels.

“The EU was taken for granted,” said a senior EU27 official intimately involved in the Brexit negotiations, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The key to the deal was a studied ambiguity that allowed partisans on both sides to claim they got what they wanted — or at least had a route to getting what they wanted peacefully.

Irish nationalists could throw away their British passports and take comfort in a provision that allowed for the unification of Ireland, if a majority of Northern Ireland were to desire it. For unionists, Northern Ireland would remain sovereign British territory.

Crucially, a complex power-sharing agreement was established that allowed all sides to feel represented by the government in Belfast. For the state to function, both sides had to agree to work together.

“The major mistake of the British government is she did not push back vigorously enough on the definition of a 'hard border'” — Senior EU27 official

What wasn’t part of the discussion: the border.

The 1998 accord makes no reference to the Irish border, merely committing the U.K. to normalizing security arrangements “consistent with the level of threat.”

In other words, removing the militarized checkpoints now that the IRA’s war was over was made possible by the peace agreement — but it wasn’t central to achieving it.

'Borders of the past'

Dublin’s position during the Brexit negotiations has been that while an open border might not be in the Good Friday Agreement, it has since become an essential part of the peace that has followed. To disrupt it would undermine the trust of the nationalist community in the political settlement.

It would also put real strain on “strand two” of the peace agreement, which created a “North-South ministerial council” aspiring to “common policies” north and south.

Theresa May has agreed. “People who are of Irish citizenship can be part of living in the United Kingdom, but to all intents and purposes can operate across the island of Ireland. It is that that we must recognize, that lies at the heart of the Good Friday Agreement,” she told MPs on the House of Commons’ liaison committee on May 1.

It is this belief that led the British prime minister to pledge that Brexit would not cause a return of physical infrastructure on the Irish border — a totemic promise which, coupled with her vow to extricate the U.K. from the EU’s single market and customs union, set the scene for the backstop.

This pledge went far beyond her original promise not to return to “the borders of the past.”

“You couldn’t fault her for good faith,” said the senior EU27 official. “The major mistake of the British government is she did not push back vigorously enough on the definition of a 'hard border.'”

The official said even in Dublin there was some unease at the Irish government’s hard-line position. “There were differences of opinion on [whether] the interpretation of the Good Friday Agreement had been taken too far,” the official said.

Unionists — hard-line and moderate — have been sending warning flares about their opposition for months.

The trouble for the unionists is that the EU had insisted that to maintain the absence of border checks on the island of Ireland necessitates a separation between Belfast and London — subjecting Northern Ireland to rules and regulations set not in Westminster but Brussels.

Last fall, at London's request, the EU moved from its preferred Northern Ireland-only backstop proposal to allowing a U.K.-wide backstop in order to minimize the differences between the region and mainland Britain. But the need for regulatory checks in areas such as meat hygiene and plant health remained.

Unless the U.K. stays inside the EU’s single market and customs union, thereby avoiding the need for all checks on goods moving between the EU and U.K., a border has to go somewhere. If the U.K. will not allow it to go between Northern Ireland and Ireland, it must go between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K.

To many Northern Irish unionists this is as unacceptable as border checks with Ireland are to nationalists.

“Putting a border up the Irish Sea immediately moves us,” said Stephen Barr, senior press officer at the Ulster Unionist Party — the smaller, moderate unionist party in Northern Ireland that supported Remain in the 2016 referendum and was once the dominant party in Ulster.

“Physically we’re not moved,” he said. “We’ve still got the same homes in the same land, but suddenly there’s a threat. Suddenly the laws over us are being set by someone else, not by our own nation in our own parliament in our own capital. And that’s a problem.”

For Robin Swann, the party’s leader, the implications strike at the heart of what it means to be a unionist.

“When you look at the backstop in the Withdrawal Agreement we see borders down the Irish Sea,” he said in his office in Stormont.

Swann said the backstop is “direct rule from Brussels,” making Northern Ireland a de facto colony of the EU capital.

Betrayal fears

Unionists — hard-line and moderate — have been sending warning flares about their opposition for months.

In December 2017, Swann wrote to May about the backstop. Regulatory alignment between Northern Ireland and the EU, he said, “would endanger the constitutional status of Northern Ireland.” He added, in correspondence seen by POLITICO: “We fear that in these circumstances, some may assume Dublin would speak for Northern Ireland in Brussels. This would represent a clear breach of the Belfast Agreement and the principle of consent.”

The UUP leader wrote to Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, British Prime Minister Theresa May and EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier on March 1 to say: “It seems clear that in spite of their supposed commitment to defending the Belfast Agreement, neither the Irish Government nor the EU negotiators seems to have either read it or understood it.”

In his reply to Swann on March 13, Barnier said the EU is committed to “safeguarding the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement in all its dimensions.” On March 31, Varadkar replied, insisting the backstop “firmly recognizes the need to respect the provisions of the Good Friday Agreement regarding the constitutional status of Northern Ireland and the principle of consent.”

The failure by European leaders to change their position to cater to the unionist point of view has exasperated many in No. 10 Downing Street.

“Merkel doesn’t get it,” sighed one senior official close to the U.K. prime minister days after the German chancellor visited Dublin last month. Merkel used the occasion to make a solemn warning about the dangers of borders, highlighting her own childhood behind the wall in East Germany.

Among many Belfast unionists there’s a growing sense that, by accepting the backstop, May’s government abandoned their cause.

“She doesn’t understand that for the unionists, their British identity is more important to them than the Irish identity,” the official said. “She has taken her own lessons, and has drawn the wrong conclusion. For her it’s just about the border with Ireland, but she doesn’t or can’t see the fears of the unionists about a new border being erected with the rest of the U.K.”

Seen from Brussels and Dublin, however, the necessity for the backstop was created by Theresa May herself. When she set out her red lines for Brexit — no physical infrastructure on the border; outside the single market; outside the customs union — the backstop became inevitable. “The problem is she never really came to terms with the incompatibility of the commitments she had set,” said the senior EU official.

Among many Belfast unionists there’s a growing sense that, by accepting the backstop, May’s government abandoned their cause. “There’s a hardcore within the Conservative Party which would gladly see the back of this place, of Northern Ireland, to get their pure Brexit,” said Swann.

The senior EU27 official agreed that historical mistrust of London is at the heart of the issue. “This is about unionists’ worst fears that the British government were always going to betray them,” the official said. Northern Ireland only emerged as a semi-autonomous statelet after a threatened armed insurrection by Irish unionists against British government plans for “Home Rule” from Dublin.

Proponents of the backstop have argued that for Northern Ireland, the measure is popular and could offer the best of both worlds — close economic ties to both the EU and U.K. markets. It would be uniquely well-placed for investment, with — potentially — a competitive advantage for the first time in decades over Dublin and London.

It could do with it. Northern Ireland is the poorest part of the U.K. and now lags far behind its neighbor to the south.

Lee Reynolds, the DUP’s director of policy, said that this analysis misses the point. For Northern Irish unionists this is about country, not prosperity — identity not marginal economic gains.

He illustrated his point with a story from his childhood when he watched a neighbor run out of his house wearing trousers with a big rip up the backside.

The occasion was a visit in 1984 by Ian Paisley, then the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party and the face of hard-line unionism.

Thirty-five years later, Reynolds still remembers his father’s observation as the two of them watched his neighbor run out to see Paisley pull up in his armor-plated car.

“Will you look at that, his arse is hanging out of his trousers, and he’s out there cheering,” the senior Reynolds remarked. “Well, I suppose if your arse is hanging out of your trousers, country is all you’ve got.”

The story is a crude one, but to Reynolds it’s a reminder of what he and others believe negotiators in London, Dublin and Brussels are overlooking. “This is our country and they’re trying to take it away,” he said.

Political collapse

In 1976, a U.K. government official wrote a note on the crisis in Northern Ireland, which had entered its seventh year of violence following the collapse of the first attempt at power sharing.

“Power sharing cannot be imposed,” read the note, released under the 30-year rule decades later. “The history of Northern Ireland has shown that any party representing a sizeable group within the community has the power to bring ordered government to an end.”

By then, to all intents and purposes, the first Northern Irish state had collapsed. Having had its own prime minister and House of Commons from the 1920s, direct rule from London was imposed by Westminster in 1972 in a bid to stop the sectarian civil war, which was spiraling out of control.

More than 40 years later London, Belfast, Dublin — and now Brussels — find themselves back in the same quandary.

The political collapse in Northern Ireland has been as quick as it has been total.

Before the Brexit vote, power-sharing was alive and well, with Martin McGuinness, the former IRA commander, running the country alongside the DUP First Minister Peter Robinson.

“This was the golden era,” says the crossbench peer Paul Bew, a key adviser to David Trimble during the 1998 peace negotiations. “I never guessed how quickly things would deteriorate.”

Some in the DUP fear the backstop’s construction itself could act as an incitement to violence.

The unwinding began in late 2016, not over Brexit but an obscure scandal over a green subsidy scheme which ran out of control on the DUP’s watch, costing taxpayers millions of pounds.

Amid widespread outrage McGuinness resigned in January 2017, collapsing the executive.

Within two months, he had died due to ill health. The assembly has not been up and running since, with the prospect of a return to direct rule from London inching ever closer.

The snap U.K. election in June 2017 only further entrenched the sectarian divide, catapulting the DUP into a confidence-and-supply deal with the Tories, handing them unprecedented sway in London.

Meanwhile, all moderate nationalist MPs were wiped out, leaving the more hard-line nationalist Sinn Féin in control of every border seat.

Last month, May and Varadkar issued a joint statement calling on the two sides in Northern Ireland to resume power-sharing talks. Despite the apparent mass swell of public pressure on Sinn Féin and the DUP to resume power-sharing following the funeral of Lyra McKee — at which the priest Martin Magill won a standing ovation after pleading for reconciliation — there has been no breakthrough to date.

But while there is hope that progress can be made, the battle over Brexit has added a potent new accelerant into the mix.

Without unionist — or nationalist — support, the Good Friday Agreement is dead. The peace may live on, but the institutions cannot function, irrespective of whether there is a simple majority in favor of the backstop in Northern Ireland or not.

This is not how it is seen in Dublin. Despite solid unionist opposition, expressed through its main two parties the DUP and UUP, Irish leader Varadkar has insisted a majority of voters in Northern Ireland support the backstop — and that this means it should be voted through by Westminster. Speaking in Brussels Tuesday, Varadkar said the fact that two out of the three MEPs returned by Northern Ireland back the backstop sends a clear message. “I hope the British government and British people get that message," he said.

Backstop or border

The backstop is making it harder for the DUP to take the plunge back into power with Sinn Féin, unionists told POLITICO.

“It really will make it more difficult, there’s no doubt about that,” said Dodds, the DUP’s deputy leader and the leader of its Westminster group.

“The government’s position is, they will agree virtually anything unionists and nationalists agree on,” Dodds added “But when it comes to Brexit, it appears it doesn’t matter what unionists say — 'we’re just going to go ahead with this backstop arrangement.' And that’s something that is unacceptable to many unionists.”

Most observers POLITICO spoke to in Belfast predicted no loyalist violence even if the backstop were forced through against their wishes. Those days are gone, whatever happens with Brexit — border or backstop.

“I don’t think Northern Ireland is going to go up in flames if the backstop comes into force,” said one influential unionist who wished to remain anonymous. “We will just carry on but with Northern Ireland’s place in the union eroded.”

Not everybody in the region is so optimistic.

Chris McGimpsey, a former UUP councillor in Belfast who lost his seat to the nationalist SDLP in the local elections earlier this month, said the issue is as political as it is substantive. “To go back into power [the DUP] needs [to make] major concessions to nationalism, and I’m not sure they can withstand more concessions to nationalism,” he said.

Eamonn Mallie, a veteran Northern Irish journalist and broadcaster, said he is concerned about the consequences of a defeated and dejected loyalism. “My fear would be the Democratic Unionist Party ending up very humiliated, diminished, held up to ridicule, and Sinn Féin agitate too vociferously for a border poll [on Irish reunification], I would be worried that an element within loyalism might take up a gun.”

Some in the DUP fear the backstop’s construction itself could act as an incitement to violence.

One senior party figure said: “The whole point of the backstop, that you can’t get out of it without the EU’s consent — and therefore Dublin’s consent — is almost an invitation to trouble.”

The figure pointed to a clause in the backstop that allows for its unilateral temporary suspension by the U.K. if its application “leads to serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties liable to persist.” They fear that could be taken as an invitation by hard-liners to raise tensions and cause violence.

“You don’t have to be a genius to see what might happen,” said the senior unionist figure.

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