NI Protocol is 'brutal deviation from Good Friday Agreement'

Getting goods across the Irish Sea border involves a range of new processes, checks and documentation

The NI Protocol involves a "pretty brutal" deviation from the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement, one of Ireland's former Brexit negotiators has said.

Rory Montgomery was referring to the way in which the NI Assembly can consent to the protocol continuing.

The consent vote will be held on the basis of a simple majority.

Controversial issues in NI normally require dual majorities from nationalist and unionists.

The Good Friday Agreement, a peace deal signed in 1998 that helped end decades of violence in Northern Ireland, contained special voting mechanisms to ensure equal representation for both unionist and nationalist communities.

All unionists parties oppose the protocol, but they are currently a minority in the NI Assembly.

Assembly elections are due to be held in 2022, with the first consent vote due in 2024.

Mr Montgomery is a former Irish ambassador to the EU and was a leading official for the Irish government throughout the Brexit process from 2016 to 2019.

Speaking to Irish broadcaster RTÉ's Brexit Republic podcast he said the protocol consent vote did not legally breach the Good Friday Agreement as it concerned an international rather than a devolved matter.

"This isn't a devolved matter so the British government were entitled to come up with another mechanism for measuring consent," he said.

But he added that the impact went beyond the strictly legal: "Votes in the assembly are or can be on the basis of cross-community consent and this was a deviation from that principle in a pretty brutal way."

Mr Montgomery questioned the wisdom of giving Stormont any role in consenting to the continuation of the protocol.

"In almost every way it was a very bad idea," he said.

"It didn't placate those it was intended to placate and it caused other problems."

Rory Montgomery questioned the wisdom of giving Stormont any role in consenting to the continuation of the protocol

He described as "pretty odd" that a sovereign government was outsourcing the continuation of an international agreement to a regional assembly.

He said unionists were never going to get the sort of consent mechanism they wanted.

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"What unionists understood by consent was effectively in line with provisions of the strand one institutions of the Good Friday Agreement," Mr Montgomery said.

"That was never going to be acceptable to us or to the EU side - it would effectively have given unionists a veto over the whole arrangement."

He also warned that every four years the consent vote was likely to inject poison into a system "which already has plenty of poison sloshing around".