Northern Ireland Affairs Committee Oral evidence: Brexit and the Northern Ireland Protocol, HC 157 Wednesday 9 June 2021 Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 9 June 2021. Watch the meeting Members present: Simon Hoare (Chair); Scott Benton; Mr Gregory Campbell; Stephen Farry; Mr Robert Goodwill; Claire Hanna; Fay Jones; Ian Paisley; Bob Stewart. Questions 919 - 940 Witnesses II: Susan McKay, Journalist and Author. Examination of witness Witness: Susan McKay. Q919 Chair: Let us now turn to Susan McKay. Good morning. Thank you for joining us. Ms McKay, you recently published a book—other authors are available—Northern Protestants: On Shifting Ground; it was published last month. What is your take? What is the rub? What is the actual issue here? What is the beef? Susan McKay: Thank you, Mr Chair. That is an extraordinary question in its breadth. One of the reasons why I wrote the book is that I am from the Protestant community myself in Northern Ireland, from Derry, and I have been working as a journalist, mainly in Northern Ireland, for the last 30 years. Over that time I have observed that there is an immense variety and diversity of people within the Protestant, loyalist and unionist communities and I felt that that was not widely enough recognised. For example, when we talk of loyalists, people often conflate the idea of loyalists with loyalist paramilitaries, which is so wrong. The loyalist community is extremely diverse. It includes people who vote for the unionist parties; it also includes people who vote for other non-unionist parties and many people who do not vote at all. Some of them are activists on issues like women’s rights, housing rights and LGBTQ rights. There are a lot of health workers who are from loyalist communities. There are lots of sportspeople. In many ways, there are a lot of people in those communities who are frustrated by what they see as a narrowness in the representation that they get from their political parties, but there are also people within the loyalist communities whose entire lives are completely taken up with simply trying to survive poverty, so there is a huge diversity of people there. One of the problems at the moment with the loyalist community is that they are very confused. They have had very mixed messages from their political leaders. They saw the DUP fight very hard for the hardest possible Brexit. They saw them appear to welcome the protocol, and then they saw them calling for the protocol to be ditched and blaming it on everybody else except the DUP and the British Government. There is a huge amount of confusion and there certainly is anxiety. That anxiety is being stoked. I recently heard something that was said by the sportsman Carl Frampton, who is a world-class boxer from north Belfast. He said that people had been stirring the pot again and young people are being manipulated, and that makes him overwhelmingly sad. That is one of the things that I felt when writing the book. People feel that they are being told all the time that they are at risk and under threat. They are not quite sure what they are supposed to be under threat from, but it is very unsettling. Q920 Chair: Would you typify talking about constitutional impact as a dead cat strategy? Susan McKay: I will just quote a DUP councillor, Dale Pankhurst. He talked about how loyalists have what he called a spectrum of grievances into which Brexit landed like a grenade, to use his term. He described a paranoia in the psyche and said that people felt the Good Friday agreement had been against loyalists; they feared a united Ireland; and now they feel that, post-Brexit, Northern Ireland is being used as a football by the Irish Government, the British Government and the EU. He is representing a mind-set there, which is of people who feel that they are being victimised, and there is a very strong sense of grievance at the moment in the loyalist community, but a lot of it is not actually based on fact and there is not enough emphasis on discussion. Q921 Chair: We have had the Storey funeral, the impact of which does not need to be reventilated. We have started to hear, probably at its clearest in the last few weeks, of this: the Good Friday agreement, the single market, etc, is fine if you are a middle-class Northern Ireland suburban- living professional. All the benefits are there and it is all rather good, but if you are an “ordinary family” struggling to make ends meet in an area that may have relied on heavy industry or the hereditary principle of employment, etc, the whole world has been turned upside down and you are seeing none of the benefits. It is a rather bullet-point assessment. Is that a fair assessment? Susan McKay: That is certainly a narrative that is pushed, but the primary thing that people do feel very strongly in the loyalist community and in all the communities in Northern Ireland is grateful for the fact that violence has stopped, which is a product of the Good Friday agreement. There are problems about the fact that economic benefits have not flowed to working-class communities, but those are primarily to do with the political application of the Good Friday agreement rather than the content of the agreement itself. In relation to the Storey funeral, certain politicians among unionists have seized upon this notion of two-tier policing, and they are promoting this idea that disadvantage is now all on the unionist side and that we are the discriminated-against community. There simply is not evidence to back that up. There is a lot of disadvantage in Northern Ireland, but it is very broadly spread among all the communities and I do not just mean the two communities; I mean all the communities. To say that it simply applies to one community is just not true. Q922 Chair: You are plugged in. You have done a lot of research for your book. You have listened to a lot of voices and opinions. Within the cohort of opinion that we are talking about—let us refer to it as the loyalist and unionist community—what is your guesstimate with regard to the percentage split to those who say, “Look, we would not go out and buy the protocol if it was on the supermarket shelf, but if it is working speedily, I can get my stuff delivered, and effectively it is an invisible thing that does not impact on the operation of my daily life, I will put up with it”, to those who say, “You cannot make something that has this so- called constitutional status impact. There is nothing you can do. It is like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. It just has to go”? Where do you think the split is with regard to opinion on that, because at the moment it is not sounding very nuanced? Susan McKay: I do not think there is such a split, because a lot of people see the protocol as simply being a figleaf for Brexit. A lot of people feel that what is being blamed on the protocol should more properly be blamed on Brexit, which was enthusiastically championed by the current British Government and by the DUP. The protocol has become a fetish with unionist politicians. I heard Paul Givan, the incoming First Minister, describe it as being a punishment inflicted upon the unionist community. It is not. It is a way of dealing with how you protect the Good Friday agreement and its need for a soft border in Ireland when you have opposed every other position. A lot of people I spoke to from all communities within unionism talked about what a mistake the DUP had made in rejecting Theresa May’s form of Brexit and instead backing Boris Johnson, the current Prime Minister, which he then went ahead and implemented regardless of what unionists thought about it. An awful lot of unionists feel we are dealing with Brexit and an awful lot of people feel we really need stability now. They are uneasy about the fact that a summer is approaching with people threatening not to abide by the law in relation to the Parades Commission and so on. People are uncomfortable and they feel that the protocol is simply being used as a scapegoat for all kinds of other problems. Bob Stewart: Morning, Susan. I have to say, I rather liked your analysis at the start. I am most grateful for it and I look forward to reading your book now I have been directed to it by the Chair, who says we all have to read it. Chair: I am not on commission yet. Q923 Bob Stewart: Clearly, from what you say, the protocol is a trade issue and a constitutional issue. Is there anything else that is bad about it from your point of view, looking at it from rather an impartial point of view? Susan McKay: A lot of the anger that is being directed at the protocol is actually anger about something much more fundamental in unionism. I went to a demonstration in Portadown, which is a very militant unionist town in mid-Ulster, at the weekend. What I was hearing there from speakers on the platform, and people I was talking to and listening to in the audience, was that they are actually against the Good Friday agreement.