What is the Northern Ireland Protocol and why does it matter?

Published

2 years ago

February 17, 2023

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The Northern Ireland Protocol has been at the heart of UK politics for the past few years.

Since the Brexit transition period ended on 31 December 2020, the protocol has been a point of friction between Westminster, Belfast and the EU.

In May 2022, Sinn Fein made history by becoming the first nationalist party to win the most seats in Northern Ireland Assembly elections, with the unionist DUP experiencing big losses.

The protocol was blamed for much of that turnaround in votes, with the DUP refusing to take part in government unless the protocol is abandoned or replaced, meaning there is no sitting government in Northern Ireland.

In a bid to break the impasse, a controversial bill put forward by Boris Johnson when he was prime minister which would have allowed the UK to change the protocol without the permission of the EU.

Since Rishi Sunak took over, relations have thawed slightly, with EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen saying in January 2023 that she has a “very trusted and excellent relationship” with the PM and their teams are “working together to find solutions”.

On 16 February, Mr Sunak travelled to Northern Ireland to meet local leaders amid mounting speculation a deal is within reach.

What is the Northern Ireland Protocol?

The UK and EU agreed to put the protocol in place after Brexit to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland.

Lorries can continue to cross the border from Northern Ireland into the Republic without having paperwork and goods checked – as they did when the UK was in the EU.

Because Ireland remains in the EU, a new arrangement was needed to reflect the EU’s strict food rules and border checks.

The protocol states that Northern Ireland will remain part of the UK’s customs territory – so if the UK signs a free-trade deal with another country, Northern Irish goods would be included.

However, Northern Ireland has to stick to some EU rules to allow goods to move freely into the Republic and the rest of the EU.

Goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland are not subject to a tariff unless they are “at risk” of being moved into the EU afterwards.

How does it work in practice?

Products from Great Britain entering Northern Ireland have had to undergo EU import procedures at the ports.

To carry out those checks, an Irish Sea border has effectively been imposed – which Boris Johnson promised would not happen.

This has resulted in delays and sometimes sparse supermarket shelves as some suppliers have decided to stop selling to Northern Ireland due to the new cost and difficulty.

There have also been problems with “medicines, on pets, on movements of live animals, on seeds, on plants and on many others”, former Brexit negotiator Lord Frost said last year.

Not all checks specified by the EU have been fully implemented, such as paperwork for supermarkets which was reduced during a temporary “grace period”.

However, those grace periods have been extended by the UK, which has resulted in a row with the EU as it says it is a breach of international law.

A breakthrough under Rishi Sunak?

Relations between the UK and the EU have become slightly more cordial since Mr Sunak became prime minister in October.

On 31 January 2023, The Times reported the EU has accepted a plan to avoid routine checks on goods going into Northern Ireland which will involve a green lane for goods from Great Britain that are staying in the region and a red lane to check and control products going on to Ireland and the rest of the EU.

However, a Foreign Office source suggested the report was speculative and officials were engaged in “intensive scoping talks” with Brussels.

Ms von der Leyen rubbished the claims and said “everything is negotiated at the very end” but they were “very constructive talks”.

On 16 February, Mr Sunak travelled to Belfast to meet Stormont leaders amid growing speculation that a Brexit deal is edging closer.

However, senior figures within the DUP and the European Research Group of the Tory party have warned that any deal must remove the oversight of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Northern Ireland as well as dealing with trading difficulties.

While it is understood the EU and UK are close to signing off a deal that would reduce protocol red tape on the movement of goods from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, there is no expectation that Brussels is willing to agree to end the application of EU law in the region.

The EU contends that a fundamental plank of the protocol – namely that Northern Ireland traders can sell freely into the European single market – is dependent on the operation of EU rules in the region.

What do the unionists think of the protocol?

All three unionist parties – the DUP, Ulster Unionist Party and Traditional Unionist Voice – are very much opposed as they argue the Irish Sea border threatens Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom.

The DUP’s Paul Givan resigned as first minister over the matter in February 2022.

Current DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson said before the elections that his party would not re-enter the Stormont Executive – which requires the support of both nationalists and unionists to function – until Westminster acts to “protect Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom”.

The DUP has set out seven tests it says must be met before it supports any new deal on the protocol.

They include: no new checks on goods between GB and NI, compatibility with the Act of Union (all part of the UK should be on equal trade footing), avoiding any diversion of trade where NI customers have to switch to non-GB suppliers, no Irish Sea border, NI citizens to have a role in any new regulations that impact them, no new regulatory barriers between GB and NI unless agreed by NI Assembly, honouring the “letter and spirit” of NI’s constitutional position by requiring upfront consent of any diminution in constitutional status.

The party said it will only enter into a power-sharing government if other parties agree the protocol must be removed or replaced.

He has claimed the protocol has led to higher prices than in the rest of the UK, particularly for dairy products and chilled convenience foods.

What do nationalists think of the protocol?

The two main nationalist parties, Sinn Fein and the SDLP, back the protocol.

Sinn Fein is in favour of the protocol as it prevents a hard border on the island of Ireland, and they want the island to be one nation.

Its vice-president Michelle O’Neill, who is set to become first minister if a power-sharing deal can be reached, said it is also a “mitigation against Brexit”.

With Sinn Fein becoming the largest party in Stormont, nationalist views are likely to be bolstered on either side of the Irish border which could mean further resistance to changes to the protocol.

Can Northern Irish parties do anything about the protocol?

The Assembly can vote on whether to continue with the protocol in 2024, but would require cross-community support to extend the deal by eight years.

With the unionists very much opposed, this seems unlikely at the moment.

However, a simple majority vote in favour could extend the arrangement for a minimum of four years.

What is Article 16?

Article 16 is a clause intended to be used when the protocol is leading to serious “economic, societal or environmental difficulties that are liable to persist, or to diversion of trade”.

It allows either the UK or the EU to act unilaterally to suspend parts of the Brexit treaty to avoid such difficulties.

Invoking the article is considered a last resort when the parties have been unable to agree a joint approach to solving the problems.

The UK has raised the prospect of triggering Article 16 in the past, something Brussels has warned would “lead to instability and unpredictability”.

Any such move could prompt the EU to respond with retaliatory measures such as imposing import taxes on some areas of trade.

What is the Northern Ireland Protocol bill?

In May 2022. the government of then-PM Boris Johnson laid out plans to override the protocol with new legislation – and without the use of Article 16, citing the need to respond to the “very grave and serious situation” around Northern Ireland trade.

Then-foreign secretary Liz Truss said the bill would preserve elements of the protocol that are working, while fixing those that are not – the movement of goods, goods regulation, VAT, subsidy control and governance – in a way Article 16 cannot.

EU officials threatened legal action, with many others accusing the bill of breaking international law.

The UK government was leaning on a legal loophole called the “doctrine of necessity”, and claimed it could pass the bill because it faced “grave and imminent peril” as a result of the protocol.

However, Mr Sunak paused progress of the bill through parliament in December 2022 as efforts to secure a negotiated settlement with the EU ramped up.

World

Stakes high for Trump-Putin summit as Zelenskyy faces nightmare deal

Published

10 hours ago

August 10, 2025

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Stakes high for Trump-Putin summit as Zelenskyy faces nightmare deal

For Ukraine – its exhausted, brave soldiers, its thousands of bereaved families mourning their dead, and its beleaguered president – it is exactly what they feared it would be.

They fear the compromise they will be forced to make will be messy, costly, unfair and ultimately beneficial to the invading tyrant who brought death and destruction to their sovereign land.

Six weeks ago, I spoke to President Zelenskyy in London.

War latest: Team Trump ‘risk being out of their depth’ at Putin meeting

I put it to him in our Sky News interview that Presidents Trump and Putin were heading towards making a deal between themselves, a grand bargain, in which Ukraine was but one piece on the chessboard.

Zelenskyy smiled as if to acknowledge the reality ahead.

He paused and then he said this: “We are not going to be a card in talks between great nations, and we will never accept that… I definitely do not want to see global deals between America and Russia.

“We don’t need it. We are a separate story, a victim of Russian aggression and we will not reward it.”

It was a response that betrayed his greatest fear – that this will become essentially a Trump negotiation in which Zelenskyy and Ukraine will be told “take it or leave it”.

And, by the way, if you “leave it”, then it will be painful.

Harsh realities

It’s the prospect that now confronts Zelenskyy as Trump and Putin plough ahead on a course that has clear attractions for both of them.

Of course, Zelenskyy is right to say there can be no deal without Ukraine. But there are harsh realities at play here.

Trump wants a deal on Ukraine – any deal – that he can chalk up as a win. He wants it badly and he wants it now.

It’s the impediment to a broader strategic deal with Putin and he wants it out of the way. It’s what he does, and it’s the way he does it. And President Putin knows it.

He knows Trump, he sees an opportunity in Trump, and he can’t get across Russia to Alaska fast enough. He will be back at global diplomacy’s top table.

Always a deal to be done

Make no mistake, when Trump says he just wants to stop the killing, he means it. Such wanton loss of young lives offends him. He keeps saying it.

He sees war, by and large, as an unnecessary waste of life and of money. Deals are there to be done. There’s always a deal.

Sadly for Ukraine, in this case, it is unlikely to be a fair deal.

How can any deal be “fair” when you are the victim of outrageous brutality and heinous crimes.

But it may well be the deal they have to take unless they want to fight an increasingly one-sided war with much less help from Trump and America.

A senior UK diplomat told me if things turn out as feared, it should not be called a land-for-peace deal. It should be called annexation “because that’s what it is”.

But here’s the rub.

Peace, calm, the end of the nightly terror of war has much to recommend it. In short, a bad peace can often seem better than no peace. But, ultimately, rewarded dictators always come back for more.

If Ukraine has to accept a bad peace, then it will want clear security guarantees to make sure it cannot happen again.

It is the very least they deserve.

There is much at stake in Alaska.

World

Desperation only grows in Gaza, as crowds swell at protests in Israel

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10 hours ago

August 10, 2025

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Desperation only grows in Gaza, as crowds swell at protests in Israel

As if life in Gaza wasn’t hard enough, there is now a heatwave – compounding the problems of minimal water, food and the basics you need to keep a family alive.

To keep your children halfway clean, when you’ve been displaced over and over again, forced to live under tarpaulin rammed up against your neighbours.

“We suffer greatly, especially because we live in tents,” says Riham Akel, who was displaced from the north and now lives in Gaza City.

“They are made of cloth and plastic that do not protect us from the heat. In addition, there is no electricity, drinking water or water for washing, no fans or air conditioning.”

Given Israel’s planned takeover of Gaza City – and the evacuation of the 800,000 or so people now living there – it’s likely she’ll be forced to move again.

In Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, the crowds have swelled these past two Saturdays – almost doubling after Hamas published propaganda videos showing two of the remaining hostages starving in captivity – and now this week, Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to push ahead with full security control of the Gaza Strip.

People here just want it to stop.

Yael said: “I feel like a hostage in my own country, as though no one listens to me – 80% of the citizens don’t want it anymore.”

“When you talk about the government it’s not only Gaza,” says David Solomon. “They are trying to undermine the democracy in Israel, they’re trying willingly to destroy the whole of Israel, they don’t care just for another year or two of their survival.”

There are also calls for IDF soldiers to refuse to carry out Netanyahu’s plan to take over Gaza City.

Another major point of contention is what many see as the failure of the International Red Cross to bring food to the hostages. Food for the Palestinians in Gaza is not much discussed, except for a small group on the fringes.

“We believe that the Israeli public is ignorant on purpose,” says Gilad Melzer – holding up a sign saying “Stop Genocide” with a photo of a starving child.

“Some of it wants to stay ignorant and some, the government wants to keep them ignorant of what is going on in Gaza and they’re ignorant as well of what is going on in the occupied territories.”

Benjamin Netanyahu seems to have made up his mind, though. He will ramp up the fight, despite international outcry, despite the opposition of his military leadership and despite the tens of thousands who rally each week in Hostages Square, hoping someone in government will bother to listen.

There is a sense of hopelessness here – that the solidarity of numbers still makes so little difference.

World

Gaza ‘injured his soul’: Israeli soldier died by suicide two days before he was due to return to duty

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10 hours ago

August 10, 2025

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Gaza 'injured his soul': Israeli soldier died by suicide two days before he was due to return to duty

When your son is risking his life fighting in Gaza, you don’t expect to hear news he’s been killed on a rest period at home.

Eliran Mizrahi had served 187 days as a reservist in Gaza since 8 October, before he died by suicide in June last year.

His mother Jenny has turned Eliran’s childhood bedroom into a shrine. The 40-year-old’s combat vest hanging on the wall still has sand in it from Gaza.

The cap he was wearing when he died, sits just above it on a shelf laden with memories of his life.

Israel is seeing a wave of soldiers like Eliran taking their own lives – five died by suicide just last month.

IDF (Israel Defence Forces) investigations have found it is what they have seen and done in Gaza that are the cause, according to reports by the Israeli public broadcaster.

Eliran’s mother told Sky News her son returned from Gaza a changed man and she fears there will be many more suicides among Israeli soldiers.

“He never left Gaza in his mind,” says Jenny.

“When he came back he couldn’t go back to work. He was a great father with a lot of patience. And he lost his patience with his children, with people.

“He was very silent. He didn’t sleep at night, he had nightmares. We didn’t know anything about it. He didn’t speak. Whenever we asked him he said everything is okay.”

Jenny describes Eliran as someone who was happy and friends with everyone. A father of four “with a big heart” and a big smile. But his experience of the war “injured his soul”.

Initially, he was deployed to clear bodies of people slaughtered by Hamas at the Nova Festival on 7 October and then deployed to Gaza a day later.

Eliran was active on social media and shared videos of his time in Gaza. He was commander of a unit of D9 bulldozers that destroyed buildings and tunnel shafts.

After his death, his D9 partner, Guy Zaken, told a parliamentary committee they were often shot at and they ran over hundreds of bodies.

Yet they filmed themselves smiling and singing to send to their families. Eliran shared some of those videos on social media.

Israel has levelled vast parts of Gaza. Eliran’s actions were part of a systematic campaign the UN says has damaged or destroyed over 90% of Gaza’s homes. Human rights experts warn this could be a war crime.

Eliran was pulled out of Gaza after he sustained knee injuries in an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) attack on his bulldozer.

‘The bodies and the blood’

He was later diagnosed with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) – we don’t know the cause of his trauma but in the end he couldn’t live with it. Two days before he was due to return to active duty, he took his own life.

“What he saw over there in Gaza injured his soul. You see all the bodies over there and all the blood. It hurts your soul,” says Eliran’s mother.

Israeli media is reporting at least 18 soldiers have taken their own lives so far this year.

Thousands are suffering with PTSD. And more and more reservists are quietly refusing to turn up for duty.

The IDF says supporting its service members is a top priority and it invests significant resources in doing so, including deploying mental health officers in all military units.

Tuly Flint was one of those officers. A clinical social worker and expert in trauma therapy in his professional life, and a lieutenant colonel in the military reserves, he was deployed to offer psychological support to troops who served in Gaza.

Last year, after treating many soldiers and becoming exposed to the extreme suffering of Gazans, Tuly came to the conclusion the war had no purpose and it was a crime against humanity. So he refused to continue to serve in the IDF.

“At the beginning of the war what we usually saw was simple PTSD. People who talk about the horrors they saw in the first few weeks with the massacre of Hamas,” says Tuly.

“But since the second month of the war, people started talking about what takes place on the Palestinian side.

“Even people that were not talking about Palestinians’ rights, or anything like that, they started talking about the fact that they saw bodies of children, of old people, of women.”

‘You think, are they lying to me’

I asked Tuly how soldiers feel hearing Benjamin Netanyahu‘s narrative that there is no starvation in Gaza – that the images we see are a lie.

The Israeli military bears witness to what is happening in Gaza in a way most of the world, including international journalists, still can’t.

“When you hear your government and your commanders telling things that are not true, you start thinking, are they lying to me also?” says Tuly.

“When you hear your prime minister lying about things that you saw in Gaza, things that you did … people talk about torching houses, people talk about a ‘deadline’ – not a metaphor – a deadline when people cross they will be killed no matter if they are children or women … they see people starving and they also see the chaos.”

After nearly two years of war, the human cost is weighing heavily on Israeli society. A majority of Israelis now believe that only a deal, not military pressure, will bring the remaining hostages home.

And the humanitarian crisis unfolding just across the border is becoming a source of public unease. Former military and intelligence chiefs are also now against the war.

The Commanders for Israel’s Security group (CIS) has argued, in its professional judgement, “Hamas no longer poses a strategic threat to Israel” – and has written to Donald Trump asking him to compel Benjamin Netanyahu to end the war.

Tuly Flint says there’s an erosion of trust between soldiers and those leading them.

“When you come back home and you hear so many people – former chiefs of staff, former heads of the security bodies of Israel – saying ‘this war has no aim anymore’ … you say to yourself: ‘I hear from former chiefs of staff that I’m killing hostages by waging war and my government is still sending me there?’

“When you see the pictures that you’ve seen with your own eyes and your government says ‘no this is a lie, no this is propaganda’, this makes you distrust everyone. And when you distrust everyone, why would you ask for help?”

The mental and moral burden on soldiers could be about to grow.

Despite strong objections from the IDF’s chief of staff, Israel is expanding military operations in Gaza with plans to take control of the entire territory.

We understand that references to suicide in any context can be difficult for some people. We provide details of support available from the Samaritans where any such references are included. You can find these here: call Samaritans for help on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org in the UK. In the US, call the Samaritans branch in your area or 1 (800) 273-TALK.