Northern Ireland's DUP agrees to UK deal after 2-year political deadlock

Northern Ireland has moved a step closer to ending a nearly two-year political deadlock after the main pro-UK party finally endorsed a deal with London aimed at reopening the region's assembly.

The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader Jeffrey Donaldson said on Tuesday the agreement with London — approved in an internal vote at a closed-door meeting in Lisburn, near Belfast — formed a basis to restore the Northern Ireland Assembly, which has been paralysed for nearly two years.

"The result was clear. The DUP has been decisive. I have been mandated to move forward," Donaldson told reporters at around 1:00 am (0100 GMT) following a marathon five-hour meeting and vote.

Donaldson told BBC radio on Tuesday that the deal would be published "as early as tomorrow" (Wednesday) and would include "constitutional legislation" as well as "practical arrangements".

DUP walked out of the regional power-sharing government in February 2022 in protest at post-Brexit trade arrangements for Northern Ireland, which has the UK's only land border with the European Union.

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called it a "positive step" towards restoring the institutions and "delivering for the people of Northern Ireland," his spokesman said.

Sunak's Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris told reporters that "all the conditions are now in place for the assembly to return," with little opposition expected in Westminster.

The deal contained "significant changes... to make sure our internal market works properly", he added, saying he did not believe it would require renegotiations with the EU.

Public sector problems

An approved deal would allow the DUP and the nationalist pro-Irish Sinn Fein to elect a speaker for the Assembly as early as next week.

It would also see Sinn Fein's Michelle O'Neill become first minister — the first time a nationalist has held the post after her party overtook the DUP in the last Assembly election in May 2022.

Mary Lou McDonald, leader of Sinn Fein, said that was of "very great significance" and she was optimistic the assembly would be back up and running before a February 8 deadline.

A key plank of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which ended three decades of sectarian violence over British rule in Northern Ireland, was to keep an open border with EU member the Republic of Ireland to the south.

But Brexit threw up a conundrum — how to protect the European single market and customs union if the UK was no longer part of it when there was effectively an open back door for goods to cross in and out via Northern Ireland.

The post-Brexit trading arrangements sought to square that circle, deciding that the EU-UK border for goods checks would run down the Irish Sea.

Unionists are concerned the solution effectively puts Northern Ireland on the EU side of the border and the other three nations of the UK — England, Scotland and Wales — on the other.

They said that by keeping the province partly under EU law, opened the door to Northern Ireland being reunited with the Irish Republic — a prospect they bitterly oppose.

During protracted talks with London, the DUP sought to overhaul the trading rules, including reducing the number of checks on goods travelling between Northern Ireland and mainland Great Britain.