Editorial: The DUP did not say in February that Northern Ireland's place in the UK had been undermined

Morning View

With some chutzpah, a DUP MLA yesterday essentially denied that the party had backed the deal with the Tories that enshrined the Irish Sea border.​

​Deborah Erskine told Stormont that “the DUP has been clear that arrangements to which Northern Ireland is currently subject to, impact and undermine the integrity of the UK’s internal market”.

But the DUP was not remotely clear that it viewed the arrangements in that way. In fact, as we recount in our reports today, the party in February said that the ‘Safeguarding the Union’ deal to restore power-sharing with Sinn Fein “takes away the border within the UK”, and restored NI’s place in the UK internal market.

This was highly misleading, yet the complicated nature of the Irish Sea border is such that it was widely believed among unionists, who wrongly thought that minor modifications to the deal were a huge breakthrough.

In fact, this newspaper was grilled on BBC Radio Ulster as to why we were being cool about the agreement, as we had previously been grilled on BBC NI TV as to whether we would help Sir Jeffrey Donaldson get back to Stormont or would lean towards Jim Allister.

We have not accepted that being cool about the disaster of the trade barrier between NI and Great Britain meant that we had to, for example, campaign against particular politicians. On the contrary, for months we said that the DUP had been put in an intolerable position, and under pressure that was never applied to Sinn Fein when it collapsed Stormont.

And then we hoped that if the DUP did return it would be candid, say that it had achieved mitigations first in the Windsor Framework, then in this latest deal and that it was going back amid such double standards, but for the benefit of NI.

It did not take such approach. And its scrutiny of the border at the restored Stormont has been poor.