5 February 2024

The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) has revealed it will return to power-sharing at the Northern Ireland Assembly following a two-year hiatus. DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson confirmed the party has backed a deal with the UK Government aimed at addressing its concerns over post-Brexit trading arrangements set out in the Northern Ireland Protocol and Windsor Framework. The development sets the stage for MLAs to return to Stormont as early as this weekend and end the paralysis that has plagued Northern Irish politics for 23 months.

What does the deal mean?

Despite admitting the agreement with the UK hadn’t achieved everything the DUP wanted, Donaldson negotiated what he believed would be enough for his party executive to return to Stormont. The DUP leader has insisted that many controversial post-Brexit customs checks will be scrapped, that Northern Ireland’s status in the UK’s internal market has been secured, and, crucially, that the new agreement “takes away the border within the UK between Northern Ireland and Great Britain”. These achievements, however, refer only to goods that remain in Northern Ireland, rather than those that continue over the Irish border and into the EU. He also said that the deal would end “dynamic alignment”, under which trade law in Northern Ireland is required to align automatically with EU law. With the full details of the deal yet to be released, unionists and nationalists alike have only Jeffrey Donaldson’s word with which the judge the new agreement.

The UK Government will be hoping that in having Chris Heaton Harris and Steve Baker – staunch Brexiteers at the Northern Ireland Office – say that there are no commitments in the deal to align GB with EU law, prevent GB from diverging from retained EU law, or increase alignment in Northern Ireland beyond the strictly limited scope Parliament has approved, enough succour has been provided to Leave-voting Parliamentarians and activists to support the deal.

Managing the DUP’s internal fractures

Donaldson, a relative moderate by the DUP’s standards, has been battling for months to secure a compromise deal that will placate party hardliners who fiercely oppose the current post-Brexit trading arrangements in the region. The party executive has endorsed the agreement, but it is not clear how much opposition there was and will continue to be. The new agreement seemingly fails to meet the “seven tests” by which the DUP had been measuring any proposal to allay its concerns over trade. The key challenge for Donaldson now is to manage the fallout. Handling the internal discipline of the DUP nearly fell apart completely, with one attendee of the meeting seemingly having worn a wire to leak to unionist activist Jamie Bryson who live-tweeted its contents. The Party’s primacy in the unionist community is under threat in its most serious challenge since it overtook the UUP in the early part of this century.

The DUP are also not without organised challengers. Loyalists are keen to point out that not one word of the Northern Ireland Protocol has been altered, and Traditional Unionist Voice has lamented “a tawdry climbdown by the DUP on their own tests which have not been met” and accused the party of “accepting foreign law”. Indeed, the level of opposition within the DUP may still prove potent, with concerns remaining that the party may continue to lose votes to other unionist parties who oppose the Windsor Framework and insist a better deal is available.

Although there have been many false dawns in the restoration of power-sharing since 2022, the DUP’s decision to endorse the agreement, and the prospect of a return to Stormont, have been welcomed to varying degrees by Sinn Féin, the Alliance and the Ulster Unionist Party – but, as ever, the devil is in the detail and the atmosphere could always change after the UK Government publishes the deal.

This excerpt comes from our full analysis of the DUP deal. Get in touch with our consultants to learn more.

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