DUBLIN — The Democratic Unionist Party won’t make a public decision on whether to back the U.K.’s new agreement with the EU on post-Brexit trade rules for Northern Ireland until April at the earliest.
The Democratic Unionists’ latest explanation of its slow internal assessment of the so-called Windsor Framework all but eliminates the possibility that the DUP will end its blockade of Northern Ireland power-sharing before the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement on April 10, a date long viewed as an informal deadline for progress in London, Dublin and Washington.
DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson announced Monday that his party — the largest on the British unionist side of the community and essential for power-sharing to work in line with the 1998 peace deal — wouldn’t let the approaching anniversary influence the timing of its verdict on the complex Windsor Framework.
That agreement, jointly unveiled February 27 by U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, seeks to defuse unionist opposition to post-Brexit trade rules that make Northern Ireland the only U.K. region still subject to EU laws on goods. The rules, contained in the 2019 Withdrawal Agreement’s trade protocol for Northern Ireland, require EU checks on British goods as they arrive in Northern Irish ports rather than when they cross the barrier-free land border into the Republic of Ireland, an EU member.
The U.K. government has yet to schedule a House of Commons vote to approve the so-called Windsor Framework, which will require supporting legislation to proceed.
Donaldson told Ulster Television in Belfast his party couldn’t move until it sees that legislation — and also until London and Brussels clarify key elements of the Windsor package to the DUP’s satisfaction.
Donaldson said the DUP is forming an eight-member internal panel to assess the Windsor Framework’s pros and cons for unionism. The panel — which will include former DUP leaders Peter Robinson and Arlene Foster — will provide a report for DUP officers’ eyes only by the end of March.
Those officers, in turn, would take time weighing the panel’s advice before making their own verdict on whether the changes on offer would be sufficient for the DUP to permit the revival of a cross-community government, the core goal of the Good Friday Agreement.
“I’m not setting the end of March as the deadline. I want to get this right, however long that takes,” Donaldson said.
A DUP official — granted anonymity as they were not permitted to speak to the media — told POLITICO that the party remained focused on maximizing its voter support in Northern Ireland’s local council elections on May 18.
When asked how quickly the DUP’s officer board might act on the panel’s recommendations, the official said this process “could well take weeks, not days, because we also will consult more widely with our membership across Northern Ireland. We will not be rushed until we receive all the necessary clarifications and, if needed, required changes from his majesty’s government.”
Campaigning for seats on Northern Ireland’s 11 local councils would begin in the first half of April. The DUP currently remains the largest party on those councils but fears the prospect of being overtaken by Sinn Féin, the Irish republican party that outpolled the DUP in last year’s Northern Ireland Assembly election.
Democratic Unionist electoral strategists in particular want to avoid any repeat of losing support to Traditional Unionist Voice, a small harder-line party that attracted a quarter of the DUP’s previous vote in the 2022 election.
The TUV rejects power-sharing with Sinn Féin under any circumstances — the DUP’s previous position before a historic U-turn in 2007 — and has already rejected the Windsor Framework as inadequate to prevent Northern Ireland’s growing divergence from Britain.
