The China Mail - N. Ireland deal looks to end 2-year political deadlock

The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) walked out of the regional power-sharing government in February 2022 in protest at post-Brexit trade arrangements for Northern Ireland, which has the UK's only land border with the European Union.

DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson said the agreement with London -- approved in an internal vote at a closed-door meeting in Lisburn, near Belfast -- formed a basis to restore the Northern Ireland Assembly, that has been paralysed for nearly two years.

"The result was clear. The DUP has been decisive. I have been mandated to move forward," Donaldson told reporters at around 1:00 am (0100 GMT) following a marathon five-hour meeting and vote.

Donaldson told BBC radio on Tuesday that the deal would be published "as early as tomorrow" (Wednesday) and would include "constitutional legislation" as well as "practical arrangements".

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called it a "positive step" towards restoring the institutions and "delivering for the people of Northern Ireland," his spokesman said.

Sunak's Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris told reporters that "all the conditions are now in place for the assembly to return," with little opposition expected in Westminster.

The deal contained "significant changes... to make sure our internal market works properly", he added, saying he did not believe it would require renegotiations with the EU.

An approved deal would allow the DUP and the nationalist pro-Irish Sinn Fein to elect a speaker for the Assembly as early as next week.

It would also see Sinn Fein's Michelle O'Neill become first minister -- the first time a nationalist has held the post after her party overtook the DUP in the last Assembly election in May 2022.

Mary Lou McDonald, leader of Sinn Fein, said that was of "very great signficance" and she was optimistic the assembly would be back up and running before a February 8 deadline.

- Public sector problems -

A key plank of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which ended three decades of sectarian violence over British rule in Northern Ireland, was to keep an open border with EU member the Republic of Ireland to the south.

But Brexit threw up a conundrum -- how to protect the European single market and customs union if the UK was no longer part of it when there was effectively an open back door for goods to cross in and out via Northern Ireland.

The post-Brexit trading arrangements sought to square that circle, deciding that the EU-UK border for goods checks would run down the Irish Sea.

Unionists are concerned the solution effectively puts Northern Ireland on the EU side of the border and the other three nations of the UK -- England, Scotland and Wales -- on the other.

They said that by keeping the province partly under EU law, that opened the door to Northern Ireland being reunited with the Irish Republic -- a prospect they bitterly oppose.

During protracted talks with London, the DUP sought to overhaul the trading rules, including reducing the number of checks on goods travelling between Northern Ireland and mainland Great Britain.

The mothballing of the Assembly paralysed Northern Ireland's power-sharing institutions and fuelled political uncertainty and industrial unrest in the region.

Public services crumbled as budgets were put in cold storage.

Earlier this month, 16 public service worker unions coordinated a mass strike over pay, the biggest industrial action seen in Northern Ireland for decades.

London has offered the region a £3.3 billion ($4.2 billion) financial package to solve public service pay disputes on condition that the Stormont Assembly opens again.

O'Neill told a news conference in Stormont that lawmakers needed to come together to tackle years of UK government under-funding.

"We have work to do," she said.

L.Johnson--ThChM