Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin accused the UK of “economic vandalism” in a BBC interview on Sunday. Martin was responding to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s plan to overhaul the post-Brexit Northern Ireland Protocol, branding it the worst kind of unilateralism.
A bill introduced in the House of Commons last week would dramatically overhaul the protocol, which currently mandates customs checks on goods entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain. Should the new bill pass, goods bound for Northern Ireland would not be subject to such checks, while goods bound for the Republic of Ireland via Northern Ireland would be checked and taxed at ports in the British exclave before heading south.
“The legislation effectively would be severely damaging to the Northern Ireland economy, particularly in the context of the dual regulatory standards approach,” Martin told the BBC, referring to the choice that Northern Irish businesses would have to make between complying with EU or UK standards.
“In effect, it represents a form of economic vandalism on Northern Ireland because if you look, any objective data is now showing that the Northern Ireland economy is doing very well,” he continued. The Irish government, he said, believes that the new legislation “is very, very worrying in terms of the actual damage it could do to key sectors of Northern Ireland economy.”