In the News

The head of the US congressional committee responsible for trade policy has warned Britain that a trade deal with the United States will not happen if the Belfast Agreement is jeopardised.

Representative Richard Neal said that Congress, and not the US president, writes trade agreements.

Speaking to the Irish Times ahead of Mr Johnson’s visit to Belfast, Representative Richard Neal said that the new British prime minister needed to recognise that this was not about a “return to empire.”

“He needs to be reminded that this is not about a return to empire,” he said of Mr Johnson “You’d be hard pressed to find everybody else who has been saying the things he has been saying as related to the backstop provision.”

Mr Neal, who met with senior eurosceptic members of the Conservative Party with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi earlier this year including Jacob Rees-Mogg, said he believed the Government should not back down on the question of the backstop.

“There should be no compromise,” he said. “The Good Friday Agreement has worked as well as anybody could have imagined. It brought to rest the longest standing political conflict in the history of the western world, and I don’t think there’s any reason for the Irish government to back away.”

He said that there seemed to be a “collective amnesia” among members of the British government about the situation in Northern Ireland before the peace process.

“There are not very many foreign policy initiatives that have worked as well as the Belfast agreement,” he said. “The United Kingdom should take some satisfaction from the success of the Good Friday Agreement – not try to undo it. When you consider that twenty five years ago this small geographic area, the size of Connecticut, was effectively a militarised state, patrolled by 30,000 soldiers – I’m worried that there are those who apparently dismiss the success of the accords.”

‘Undemocratic’

Noting that Mr Johnson had described the backstop as “undemocratic,” he said: “If Boris Johnson calls the backstop undemocratic then he misses the point that people in the north and in the Republican both voted for the Good Friday Agreement. It was a democratic exercise in a representative democracy.”