Why Northern Ireland Keeps UK and Europe at Odds

The UK and the European Union are wrangling over Brexit arrangements covering trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland that are designed to avoid the return of a hard border with the Republic of Ireland. Britain’s government says the current regime, known as the Northern Ireland Protocol, is stifling the flow of goods and it wants to rewrite the arrangements painstakingly agreed to in years of negotiations. The tensions are a reminder that, even though the UK officially parted ways with the EU at the start of 2020, fundamental aspects of the relationship remain problematic.

It’s an arrangement to keep goods moving between Northern Ireland, a region of the UK, and EU-member Ireland to the south, while making sure the border doesn’t turn into a soft target for smuggling goods into the EU. It does that by imposing physical checks on products arriving in Northern Ireland from mainland Britain. The UK government says the burden of new paperwork and customs procedures have disrupted trade and effectively created an internal border within a sovereign country. It’s also unhappy that the European Court of Justice oversees large parts of the protocol.