Owen Polley: It is welcome that the DUP is now supporting mutual enforcement, but it is too late

​As this newspaper reported last week, the DUP appears to have backed ‘mutual enforcement’ as its preferred arrangement for trade between Northern Ireland and the Republic.

The UK and the EU would agree to police each other’s regulations. ​It’s a great pity that the party did not make this choice earlier and instead championed the Safeguarding the Union deal

​In the Assembly, the Fermanagh MLA, Deborah Erskine, said the current set-up undermines, “the integrity of the UK’s internal market,’ whereas the new policy would apply only to companies that export to the EU.

You will remember that the party’s leadership previously claimed that it had removed the Irish Sea border, by negotiating the Safeguarding the Union deal with the government back in January. So this seems like another u-turn from the DUP.

The party has flirted with ideas of mutual enforcement before, and some of its representatives have been consistent in their support. For instance, Sammy Wilson has spoken about this arrangement as his favoured solution to Northern Ireland’s trade problems numerous times.

In June 2023, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson wrote a foreword for a paper by the Centre for Brexit Policy think-tank, that described mutual enforcement as a potentially ‘sound and stable foundation’ for restoring Stormont. He claimed that the idea was worthy of ‘serious and sustained consideration,’ but this ‘endorsement’ was more ambiguous and less wholehearted than the authors of the report would have liked.

Under mutual enforcement, the UK and the EU would agree to police each other’s regulations and any exporter from Northern Ireland that failed to adhere to Brussels’ rules would be prosecuted in British courts. That would mean that the EU ‘single market’ was protected, while local companies that sell only within Britain would be unaffected by extra regulations.

The EU likes to depict any ideas that avoid it gaining authority over Northern Ireland, or indeed anything that does not reflect its current position, as fantastical, or ‘magical thinking’ in the words of its diplomats. Mutual enforcement, though, is not a particularly fanciful suggestion. The TUV’s Jim Allister advocates the system and accused the DUP last week of ‘flip-flopping’ on sovereignty issues. The late Lord Trimble championed these proposals too, writing a column in the Irish Times to support his thinking.

In 2021, the Ulster Unionists suggested arrangements with mutual enforcement at their heart. They proposed other ideas, like a cross-border body to establish compliance and special rules on labelling, but the scheme depended upon legal sanctions for exporting goods to the EU that flouted the bloc’s regulations.

The government also made formal proposals along these lines, when Lord Frost was Brexit minister.

With mutual enforcement being publicised again, the University of Ulster economist, Dr Esmond Birnie, suggested last week that it could be an idea, ‘whose time has come’. He said that it could allow Northern Ireland to escape EU laws without undermining Brussels’ market, avoid border infrastructure on land or sea and remove the need for an onerous ‘red lane’, that affects almost all goods for manufacturing.

These arguments are unimpeachable, but mutual enforcement could only be revived if the EU and its supporters were actually interested in solving NI’s trading problems. There was a time when solid support from the government (and the DUP) might have overcome that obstacle, but firmness of purpose was lacking repeatedly when it was needed most.

It’s not impossible that a new administration, keen to reset its relationships with the EU and ease tensions in Northern Ireland, might suggest new arrangements and gain a hearing in Brussels. That supposes, though, that the bloc was genuinely interested in protecting its market in the first place, rather than punishing Britain for Brexit and retaining as much leverage over the UK as possible. In addition, for nationalists and the Alliance Party, EU law in NI is not a side-effect of the protocol and framework: it is the whole point. They’ve never really wanted what’s best for companies here, despite what they claim.

For Sinn Fein and the SDLP, the Irish Sea border is specifically supposed to divert trade and encourage the construction of ‘an all-island economy’, even if that means disrupting businesses. Meanwhile, Alliance is so blindly committed to the EU that it will fight to salvage every bit of Brussels’ authority it can, regardless of the economic consequences.

The party’s representatives portray themselves as above ideology, but their thinking is scarcely more nuanced than ‘Brexit Britain insular and bad, EU enlightened and good’. They are as captured by their prejudices and assumptions as anyone else in NI politics.

None of this is to argue that mutual enforcement is a bad idea, or that it will never happen. It just currently looks unlikely that the EU and its proxies will show enough goodwill to allow its consideration, or that an incoming government will be firm enough to insist that changes to the Irish Sea border must be made.

The proposal is designed to solve problems with the protocol, while treating the issues that Brussels raises as if they were genuine, rather than a tactical pretence. For that reason, it has moral power that makes it worth advocating,

Unfortunately, though, the protocol and the framework are not really intended to protect the single market. Rather, they’re designed to maintain EU authority over Northern Ireland, in a way that suits the objectives of Irish nationalists and people who believe that this province is a hybrid, or a ‘place apart’.

The DUP’s decision to promote mutual enforcement properly, if that is what the party is doing, gives it a more coherent position on the Irish Sea border. It’s a great pity that it did not make that choice earlier, rather than championing a deal that purported to solve our constitutional problems, but did nothing of the sort.