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What’s at Stake in Northern Ireland Trade Deal

Britain and the European Union have long clashed over post-Brexit rules known as the Northern Ireland protocol. Here’s how their renegotiated agreement, the Windsor Framework, will work.

A body of water that splits Northern Ireland, on the left, and Ireland on the right.
Carlingford Lough, with Northern Ireland on the left and Ireland on the right. The inlet marks the border.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Stephen CastleMegan Specia and

LONDON — It’s a border that needs to exist in two places, and also nowhere.

Britain’s 2016 vote to leave the European Union left many questions unanswered, but the most intractable, and potentially poisonous, was about Northern Ireland.

The territory is part of the United Kingdom, but it shares a land border with Ireland, a member of the European Union. Negotiators have repeatedly struggled to find a way to allow goods to move smoothly across the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom, without threatening the open border between Northern Ireland and Ireland — dividing lines whose significance goes far beyond trade.

In late February, almost seven years after the Brexit referendum, the two sides signed a new deal, called the Windsor Framework, that promises to smooth over at least some of those contradictions, and British lawmakers overwhelmingly backed a key part of the deal on Wednesday.

The stakes are high. Some in Brussels have spoken of a threat to the integrity of the European Union’s single economic market; some in London and Belfast of a threat to the coherence of the United Kingdom; and there were concerns about the fragility of peace in Northern Ireland, a region where decades of sectarian violence left several thousand dead.

In 2020, London and Brussels signed up to a set of trade rules for the territory, called the Northern Ireland protocol. But it ignited protests almost immediately, and Britain had been pushing to renegotiate ever since.

Now Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has reached a new agreement with the European Union. If it succeeds, it could open a warmer chapter in Britain-E.U. relations. It has already cleared the way for a visit by President Biden in April to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, which helped end decades of bloodshed in Northern Ireland known as “the Troubles.”

Here’s what to know about the new rules.

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Trucks rolling off a ferry at the Port of Larne in Northern Ireland.Credit...Phil Noble/Reuters

While the accord sounds like the title of a spy thriller, it’s actually a dry legal text that won’t be found on most people’s vacation reading lists.

Both Britain and Ireland joined the precursor to the European Union in the 1970s, leading to the end of customs checks on merchandise moving between them. Parts of the border across Ireland were fortified during the Troubles, but after the Good Friday Agreement, such signs of division faded away, leaving a frontier so open that in places it is unnoticeable.

No one wants checkpoints back, but when Britain left the European Union, Boris Johnson, then the prime minister, insisted on leaving its customs union and its single market, which allows goods to flow freely across European borders.

The protocol that he negotiated set out a plan to deal with this situation. It did so by effectively leaving Northern Ireland half inside the European system (and its giant market), and half inside the British one. The Irish border remained open, but to enforce differing customs rules, goods had to be checked when they crossed between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom.

That quickly ran into problems.

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A sign near the land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland weighs in on the border issue.Credit...Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times

The new system of customs checks effectively created a trade border inside the United Kingdom, down the Irish Sea. Some British companies stopped shipping goods to Northern Ireland, blaming the added paperwork, even as Britain unilaterally delayed implementing some of the more difficult requirements — such as one banning the import of chilled meat products like sausages.

The situation enraged some lawmakers in Mr. Johnson’s Conservative Party and many of Northern Ireland’s unionists — the roughly half of the territory’s population, mostly Protestant, who want it to remain part of Britain.

Unionist objectors said the terms threatened the unity of the United Kingdom. To them, it was as if new trade rules required checks for goods sent to California from the rest of the United States.

Some Brexit supporters also saw the protocol as a means for the European Union to retain power over a part of the United Kingdom — a suspicion reflected in Britain’s desire to remove any role in the region for the European Court of Justice, the bloc’s top court.

The British government was looking for ways to reduce the bureaucracy and to lower barriers to trade between Northern Ireland and the rest of the country, and several of its ideas ended up in the Windsor Framework.

Many traders sending goods that will not travel beyond Northern Ireland will pass through a “green lane”: Based on a registration system and commercial transit data shared with the European Union, they will be exempted from requirements for detailed customs information, and from most but not all checks and controls.

Goods headed on to Ireland will use a “red lane,” with full checks.

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The towers of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg in 2022. The deal promises to use arbitration to minimize, although not eliminate, the role of the court in future disputes.Credit...Harald Tittel/Picture-Alliance, via, Associated Press

Dual regulatory systems will make food and medicine that are legal in mainland Britain readily accessible in Northern Ireland, even if Brussels has yet to approve a drug or has banned a food additive. And some of the rules that Britain had been delaying — such as the sausage ban, and a requirement for customs declarations on parcels from individuals and online businesses — are gone.

Northern Ireland will be allowed to make additional exemptions and discounts in a Europe-wide sales tax system, meaning that it can match British tax cuts on liquor, heat pumps and solar panels.

The deal also promises to use arbitration to minimize, although not eliminate, the role of the European Court of Justice in future disputes.

But the biggest change may be what is known as the “Stormont Brake,” after Stormont Castle, the home of Northern Ireland’s government. Britain has promised to block implementation of any “significantly different” new European rules on goods if the Northern Ireland Assembly objects, using a process that takes a third of its 90 members to trigger.

To some of Northern Ireland’s unionists, the protocol isn’t just a practical problem: It’s a threat to their identity. They wanted it scrapped, not tweaked.

The Democratic Unionists, the largest unionist party, have shown their strength of feeling on the issue by boycotting the Northern Ireland Assembly. That closes the territory’s locally elected executive, because the system is designed to operate only with the consent of both unionists and the territory’s nationalists, the roughly half of the population, mostly Catholic, who want reunification with Ireland.

On the evening the deal was announced, the Democratic Unionists’ leader, Jeffrey Donaldson, was noncommittal. He said that “significant progress has been secured” but that “there remain key issues of concern.” In March, he gave a fuller and more negative assessment, declaring that the framework “does not deal with some of the fundamental problems” with post-Brexit arrangements, and needed “clarification, reworking and change.” His party has said it has no plans to rejoin the Assembly.

The other main source of potential objections was Brexit hard-liners in Mr. Sunak’s Conservative Party. Many of his lawmakers have celebrated the deal, but it drew derision from some of the loudest critics of the protocol.

British lawmakers held what may be their only vote on the framework — on legislation to implement the “Stormont Brake” — on Wednesday. The Democratic Unionists voted against it. So did Mr. Johnson, who said in a statement to local news media that the framework left Northern Ireland “captured by the E.U. legal order.”

Still, with support from the opposition Labour Party, the measure passed by a crushing margin: 515 votes to 29.

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With Boris Johnson now out of power, the European Union seemed more willing to engage with Rishi Sunak, who has tried hard to build bridges.Credit...Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

As prime minister, Mr. Johnson negotiated the protocol with the European Union and pushed it through the British Parliament. But then he championed legislation that would have allowed Britain to unilaterally override parts of it, infuriating officials in Brussels.

Both sides dug in their heels.

With Mr. Johnson out of power, the European Union seemed more willing to engage with Mr. Sunak, who has tried hard to build bridges.

E.U. leaders accepted that the protocol had its flaws, but there was only so far they were willing to go. If Brussels can’t control what enters its single market, they say, it could threaten the building blocks of European integration.

Yes. After elections for the Northern Ireland Assembly last year, the majority of its lawmakers represent parties that largely want to keep the protocol, albeit with some improvements. That’s because the protocol was designed to prevent the reintroduction of checks on goods at the politically sensitive land border with Ireland.

A return of border checks could destabilize the peace process — which is underpinned by the Good Friday Agreement and has, among other things, allowed the border to remain open.

It would particularly upset Sinn Fein, the biggest party after the election, which campaigns for Irish unification and is hostile to the return of any structures that divide the island.

Some companies in Northern Ireland also benefited from the protocol, because it allowed them sell their goods across Europe’s huge internal market as well as in mainland Britain.

So far, Sinn Fein has expressed cautious optimism about the new agreement.

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Walking through a shopping mall in Belfast.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

The European Union will also need to make legislative changes to implement the agreement. Some of the changes will take a while; the British government’s paper on the agreement promises a new regime for business parcels starting in October 2024.

As for Mr. Sunak, the vote on Wednesday suggests he is in an increasingly strong position. But he could be forgiven for not feeling entirely relaxed. The small band voting against his measure on Wednesday included not only Mr. Johnson but also Liz Truss — two former prime ministers forced out in the past year by their own Conservative lawmakers. They thought they were in strong positions once, too.

Monika Pronczuk contributed reporting.

Stephen Castle is London correspondent, writing widely about Britain, including the country’s politics and relationship with Europe. More about Stephen Castle

Megan Specia is a correspondent on the International Desk in London, covering the United Kingdom and Ireland. She has been with The Times since 2016. More about Megan Specia

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: Revising a Compromise That Made Few Happy. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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