The Belfast/Good Friday Agreement and Brexit A briefing note

Unionist agreement to the creation of the north-south institutions, with executive authority and decision-making powers in relation to aspects of government across the whole island, was, explicitly and clearly, the condition for agreement to the amendment of the Irish constitution. [...] On the one hand, unionists cannot legitimately claim that the consequences of Brexit have to be addressed only on their terms, because the whole basis of the 1998 Agreement was recognition of the legitimacy and relevance of different viewpoints on the issues of identity in Northern Ireland. [...] While the exclusion of the six counties from the home rule parliament proposed in 1912 was a response to the very clear opposition of Irish unionists, the ideas of county-by-county consent, or of plebiscites, to determine the boundary of the area to be excluded, were rejected, with the six-county solution emerging as an imposed compromise. [...] Such evidence as there is would strongly suggest that the Protocol does have the consent of a simple majority both of the electorate in Northern Ireland and the Assembly: in the general election of December 2019, there were 444,227 votes for the parties2 which, in the Assembly debate of 30 December 2020, voted for the implementation of the Protocol, and against the use of Article 16, and 337,874 v. [...] The backdrop for this clearly should have been a joint commitment of the UK and Irish governments as co-guarantors of the 1998 Agreement to support such an outcome (recognising that the views of the Irish government were represented in the withdrawal negotiations by the European Commission).