DURING the Tory leadership campaign, both Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt described the Irish Backstop as ‘dead’ in its current form, so the new PM should be interested in the views of Lord Trimble, the First Minister of Northern Ireland from 1998 to 2002.
In a report for the Policy Exchange, David Trimble warns that the Irish Backstop puts the 1998 Good Friday Agreement at risk by changing the status of Northern Ireland without achieving consent, a fundamental principle of the Agreement.
He says that the Backstop takes a top-down approach to North-South co-operation, rather than the bottom-up approach which saw the two communities successfully co-operate for the 1998 Agreement, and warns that top-down arrangements would make it easy for Dublin to insert provisions to create an all-island economy – supporting a decades-long agenda to create a united Ireland.
You can read the report, ‘The Backstop Would Wreck the Good Friday Agreement’, here.
