There is an increasingly noisy campaign in Northern Ireland to force the DUP back into power-sharing at Stormont before the Northern Ireland Protocol is resolved. In February, the party’s former first minister, Paul Givan, resigned in protest at the Irish Sea border and the executive has failed to operate since then.

Many of this tactic’s most fervent critics are Irish separatists or pro-EU liberals. Nationalists are desperate to keep the protocol in its current form because it damages key aspects of the Union, whilst europhiles in the Alliance Party want to remain tied to Brussels as closely as possible, even if that means economic damage caused by trade barriers separating the province from Great Britain.

The most ironic denunciations of the DUP’s policy come from Sinn Fein, which describes the unionist party’s actions as “undemocratic”. The “Shinners”, you may remember, prevented devolved government at Stormont for three years, between 2017 and 2020. They issued an ever-changing menu of “red lines”, including demands for legislation to give the Irish language official status in Northern Ireland.

The campaign to restore the executive is not restricted to the DUP’s declared political opponents. Belfast’s enormous industry of third sector organisations, lobbyists and pressure groups has added to the clamour — anxious, no doubt, to keep a ready supply of public money flowing into its coffers. Parts of the media are cultivating the idea that unionists are under unbearable pressure to return to office. Meanwhile, the government has attempted, with varying degrees of intensity and sincerity, to cajole Jeffrey Donaldson and his party back into power-sharing. 

Last week Conor Burns, Minister of State in the Northern Ireland Office (NIO), said, “There is no excuse for the DUP not being back in government today.” His boss, the Northern Ireland Secretary, Shailesh Vara, urged “all parties, in the strongest possible terms, to work together to form an executive and address the issues that matter most to people”.

Article 16 would start a formal process of negotiation with the EU

“There are people in Northern Ireland right now who are suffering,” he said, “Some don’t know how they’re going to put food on the table for their families and themselves.”

We do not know yet how strenuously the new prime minister, Liz Truss, will press this argument, if at all. Some commentators suggest that she will trigger the protocol’s emergency brake, Article 16, within days, and demand the DUP return to the executive immediately. 

The theory is that Donaldson would then have a reasonable excuse to explain his party’s change of policy. He could argue that the government had acted decisively against the protocol, particularly if significant aspects of the sea border were set aside, even temporarily.

The problem with this reasoning is that Article 16 would start a formal process of negotiation with the EU, and there is only a slim chance that the outcome would solve the main constitutional and economic problems raised by the protocol. Truss has suggested that the government will deal with those issues through legislation, which is due to come before the House of Lords, but europhile peers are expected to try to tie that bill up for “weeks”. The EU has already threatened that it will not deal with the incoming prime minister at all, if she tries to speed up the passage of the NI Protocol Bill.

Vara’s hectoring line about food is certainly in keeping with thinking at the NIO. Civil servants in that outpost are devoted fanatically to keeping the devolved institutions operating in a way that satisfies Sinn Fein. They are quite prepared to threaten unionists and the broader population, though they would never use similar methods to deal with republicans.

The implication of Vara’s statement is that the government is unable to help people in the province with the “cost of living crisis” in the absence of devolved institutions. That is transparently nonsense.

Ministers either already have the powers necessary to provide direct help to people in Northern Ireland or can quickly gain them back. Indeed, Vara is committed to ensuring that £400 payments toward energy bills, which are due to reach the rest of the UK from October, find their way to households in the province too. When money is distributed to the executive through the Barnett Formula, it is simply added to the province’s block grant. That means that Stormont ministers, with their history of waste and inaction, decide how extra funding is deployed, so decisions by UK ministers are more efficient and reliable.

Bring back Stormont or we may let the poorest people starve

One of the relative merits of Boris Johnson’s government was its willingness to act directly in the devolved regions and ensure that it got the credit for its actions. Liz Truss’s administration can take whatever powers it wants to help with the cost of living in Northern Ireland, with the only constraint being its squeamishness about being perceived to enact “direct rule”. That is a sensibility encouraged by the NIO, but it is intended principally to placate Sinn Fein and the Dublin government, which needs to be reminded regularly that it does not enjoy joint authority over the province.

The DUP’s responses to the various incarnations of the “Irish Sea border”, from its origins in Theresa May’s “backstop” through to Boris Johnson’s protocol, were invariably ineffectual. Its decision to leave the executive was late and reluctant, given that the United Kingdom was being carved up at the behest of Brussels, Irish separatists and the Republic of Ireland.

Its decision that this was an existential issue — one pressing enough to give up the trappings of office and the illusion of authority that it acquired from devolution — was the one DUP policy that commanded the support of most unionists. A recent poll suggested that 82 per cent of pro-Union voters agreed that the party should not restore the executive until the protocol was scrapped or changed significantly.

Though Boris Johnson’s Conservative government agreed and delivered the Irish Sea border, its ministers, and particularly Liz Truss, later provided a strong critique of why the arrangements were not acceptable or sustainable. Many of the arguments that insist the Stormont executive must return immediately rely on dismissing unionists’ genuine concerns about the protocol and actually undermine the UK’s case that it must be changed.

Truss will either continue to push the protocol bill through parliament, whether or not she triggers Article 16 as well, and bolster the government’s argument that it is dealing with the sea border; or she will get drawn into some form of negotiation with the EU. In that latter scenario, the DUP would justifiably be suspicious and alert to any form of compromise that left the protocol largely in place.

No doubt, the NIO will continue to encourage ministers to insinuate that life will get incomparably worse in Northern Ireland, unless the executive is restored. To strip away the euphemisms, this means bring back Stormont or we may let the poorest people in Northern Ireland starve or freeze. 

If it withholds help over the course of the winter to foster this idea, or pressurises the DUP into an executive before the protocol is dealt with properly, the government will be abdicating its responsibility to this part of the UK.