UK PM in N.Ireland urges unionists to get govt ‘up and running’

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Wednesday demanded that unionists end their boycott of the devolved government in Northern Ireland, in a speech marking 25 years of peace in the divided territory.

“I urge you to work with us to get Stormont up and running again,” Sunak said in Belfast.

“That’s the right thing to do in its own terms. And I’m convinced it’s also the right thing to do for our (UK) union,” he said.

Vowing to deploy the “full force” of the UK government to bolster Northern Ireland’s economy, the prime minister praised the contributions of his predecessor Tony Blair and others who forged the peace in 1998.

Despite numerous setbacks, Blair never walked away, “and neither will I”, Sunak said at the conclusion of a three-day conference marking the anniversary at Queen’s University Belfast.

The pro-UK Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) is shunning the territory’s government at Stormont over post-Brexit trading arrangements agreed with the European Union, despite itself supporting the UK’s split from the EU.

The party has stood firm so far in its refusal to rejoin the power-sharing government with the Irish nationalist party Sinn Fein, which last year won Northern Irish elections for the first time.

Sunak was later Wednesday to host a gala dinner gathering many of those who helped negotiate the Belfast/Good Friday peace agreement, including Blair and then-US president Bill Clinton.

Clinton said a reform of the EU trading rules agreed by Sunak and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, dubbed the “Windsor Framework”, had “dramatically mitigated” the impact of Brexit in Northern Ireland.

“We know what the votes were in the last election,” the former president added in his own speech at the conference, telling the DUP: “It’s time to get the show on the road.” 

Also addressing the conference, von der Leyen said: “The Windsor Framework is a new beginning for old friends.” 

The 1998 deal was followed by sworn enemies from the unionist and nationalist camps joining together in government, she said.

“History now calls on today’s leaders to embark on a similar path, and to shape together the future of Northern Ireland.”

The 1998 peace deal ended border checks on the island of Ireland as a condition for overcoming “The Troubles”.

But Brexit upended Northern Ireland’s fragile status quo by necessitating the return of a trading border between the UK and the EU. 

The customs checks are happening now between Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) and Northern Ireland, to the fury of the DUP, which fears it is a slippery slope to a united Ireland.

DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson said on Tuesday that the party would not be “browbeaten into submission”.

“The great and the good can lecture us all they want for a cheap round of applause but it won’t change the political reality,” he tweeted.

“The political institutions only work when there is cross-community consensus.”

But Irish premier Leo Varadkar reinforced the concerted pressure on the party by stressing that “continued prosperity requires a functioning government”. 

The Good Friday Agreement was about “defying historical expectations”, he said on Wednesday. “And we need that kind of leadership still.”

Sunak noted that last week in Belfast, US President Joe Biden had urged the world to invest in Northern Ireland.

“He didn’t say that out of sentimentality,” the prime minister said.

“He said it because he can see the opportunity for American businesses. And because of the enormous potential of this place.”

Joe Kennedy III, Biden’s newly appointed special envoy to Northern Ireland for economic affairs, said the 230 US businesses employing more than 30,000 people in the territory “want clarity and certainty”.

“They want to have a good idea of what might change (politically), and how and when that might happen,” the scion of the Irish-American Kennedy clan added.

“The sooner they have answers to those questions, the better for Northern Ireland’s economy.”