The new deal in a few words.

 After months of nego­ti­ations the UK and the EU, yes­ter­day pub­lished the text of their deal to refine

post-Brexit arrange­ments for North­ern Ire­land.Although North­ern Ire­land con­tin­ues to fol­low EU rules for goods trade, the new imple­ment­a­tion agree­ment sets out pro­cesses on trade, state sub­sidy and VAT policy to reduce the impact of the trade bor­der in the Irish Sea cre­ated by the ori­ginal deal.

Trade: red-green lanes

Goods com­ing from Great Bri­tain to North­ern Ire­land will be divided into two classes: those destined for North­ern Ire­land and those head­ing on to Ire­land and the EU single mar­ket.

Com­pan­ies that register for a trus­ted trader scheme and use the green lane will have «an unpre­ced­en­ted reduc­tion» of cus­toms paper­work, the EU said. On the other hand, goods in the red lane will have to go through full cus­toms, food and animal health checks.

For agri-food, the EU will accept UK pub­lic health stand­ards, mean­ing fresh meat and other goods will be allowed to enter North­ern Ire­land. However, they must carry «not for EU» labels. As the labels are intro­duced between now and 2025, the pro­por­tion of con­sign­ments sub­ject to iden­tity checks will fall to 5 per cent.

Prime min­is­ter Rishi Sunak said the changes «removed any sense of a bor­der in the Irish Sea». However, an EU offi­cial spoke of a «dra­matic reduc­tion in the num­ber of checks».

Par­cels to friends or fam­ily and from online deliv­er­ies from Great Bri­tain will not require cus­toms paper­work.

State aid and VAT

Under the pro­tocol, any UK sub­sidy decision that might affect North­ern Ire­land goods trade must be referred to Brus­sels. The UK viewed this as an impinge­ment on its sov­er­eignty. The UK said that «strin­gent tests» would now apply, in effect remov­ing 98 per cent of North­ern Ire­land sub­sidies at risk of refer­ral to Brus­sels.

Under the pro­tocol North­ern Ire­land could not adopt domestic VAT rate changes. These will now be exten­ded to North­ern Ire­land, includ­ing polit­ic­ally talis­manic items: some cuts to alco­hol duties will now apply UK-wide, includ­ing relief for beer in pubs.

Gov­ernance and con­sent

For uni­on­ists, the pro­spect that the region would have to auto­mat­ic­ally imple­ment new or updated EU law, as spe­cified in the pro­tocol, has caused ten­sion. The deal seeks to address this by hand­ing an «emer­gency brake» to the North­ern Ire­land assembly at Stor­mont that can be pulled in «excep­tional cir­cum­stances» if 30 of the 90 mem­bers from at least two parties vote to block updated EU single mar­ket rules.

Under this ‘Stor­mont brake’, rules would not be applied until they had been dis­cussed by Brus­sels and Lon­don. If Bri­tain chose not to imple­ment meas­ures the EU deemed neces­sary, the bloc could take tar­geted «remedial meas­ures». Experts said the cir­cum­stances when it could be used very tightly drawn.

EU rules had cre­ated bur­eau­cratic hurdles that uni­on­ists believed cut them off from the rest of their coun­try.

Pets had to be micro­chipped and get a pass­port to travel from Great Bri­tain to North­ern Ire­land — the same rules needed to travel to the EU. Under the deal, pets will need only a simple travel doc­u­ment. Medi­cines approved for use in the UK could also be sold in the region even if not approved in the EU.

The role of the ECJ

Lead­ing Brex­iters and uni­on­ists have deman­ded an end to the jur­is­dic­tion of the European Court of Justice over North­ern Ire­land and to its role as the enfor­cer of the pro­tocol.

The deal does not achieve this, nor does it cre­ate a dis­pute res­ol­u­tion mech­an­ism involving inter­na­tional arbit­ra­tion, as some Brex­iters had wanted.

The UK argued that the new «green lane» trad­ing sys­tem sig­ni­fic­antly nar­rowed the amount of EU law apply­ing in North­ern Ire­land, mean­ing that 1,700 pages of EU law that were enforced in the ori­ginal deal would no longer apply.

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