Sinn Fein leaders accused British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Wednesday of being “reckless” with Northern Ireland peace as they travelled to Brussels to defend the EU-UK Brexit deal on the UK province.
Mary Lou McDonald, the leader of the Irish nationalist party, said at a press conference that Johnson’s government’s plan to unilaterally withdraw from parts of the Northern Ireland Protocol in the Brexit treaty was “unacceptable.”
“Boris Johnson must, and the British government must, come off this very, very destructive path because they put in peril, they put in jeopardy, the peace and the Good Friday Agreement settlement that we have all built so painstakingly over decades,” she said.
She and Sinn Fein vice president Michelle O’Neill, who is poised to take up the first minister’s post in the Northern Ireland administration after their party emerged from elections last month as the province’s biggest party, were in Brussels to defend the protocol.
They said they met with the EU’s pointman on Brexit, European Commission Vice President Maros Sefcovic, to express their support for the bloc and Britain to resolve problems over Northern Ireland within the protocol’s framework.
Read more: Northern Ireland in limbo after Sinn Fein triumphs
London and Brussels are in deadlock over the Northern Ireland Protocol, which was struck to uphold the peace gained from the 1998 Good Friday Agreement which put an end to sectarian violence that killed thousands over three decades.
It created a customs border down the Irish Sea, keeping Northern Ireland in the EU’s customs orbit so as to avoid a hard border between it and EU member Ireland.
While both sides acknowledge there are problems in implementing the deal, they are split on how to resolve them.
The EU says the mechanisms in the protocol permit fine-tuning on issues such as animal and plant checks and supermarket supplies.
But Britain, backing Northern Ireland unionists, wants the protocol fundamentally rewritten and is threatening to disapply parts of it if the EU does not bend.
“They are cynically using the people of the North in their game of chicken with the European Commission,” McDonald said.
“Boris Johnson needs to get real and needs to engage in good faith and negotiations,” she said.
She stressed that most members of the incoming Northern Ireland assembly backed the protocol, and that under it, the province was economically outperforming the rest of the United Kingdom.
She reprimanded the DUP, the assembly’s largest unionist party, for impeding the assembly’s work by refusing to nominate ministers.
“The British government’s role in terms of propping up the DUP and facilitating this behaviour isn’t acceptable,” McDonald said, urging that a Northern Ireland executive be formed “immediately”.
Read more: UK demands EU action on N.Ireland as US lawmakers visit
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