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The leader of Northern Ireland’s biggest pro-UK party has acknowledged a Brexit-linked deal he helped clinch to restore the region’s power-sharing executive has been oversold, drawing criticism from rival parties.
Gavin Robinson said “there should have been more cautious realism” over the four-month-old agreement, which his Democratic Unionist party had insisted in effect removed a post-Brexit custom border in the Irish Sea.
The border has been the subject of intense controversy as critics have argued it internally divides Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK and limits its ability to trade with Britain.
It was put in place because Northern Ireland retained access to the EU single market for goods after Brexit, as well as the UK internal market.
“We have achieved great success but that doesn’t mean the work is over. The work should, and indeed must, continue,” Robinson told BBC Radio Ulster on Thursday. Asked repeatedly whether the DUP had oversold this year’s agreement, Robinson said: “Yes.”
On Wednesday the DUP leader told his party executive his goals were “removing the application of EU law in our country and the internal Irish Sea border it creates”, he said. The EU has consistently opposed such moves.
The comments would ensure Brexit would loom over the July 4 UK general election in the region, according to Jon Tonge, politics professor at the University of Liverpool.
“In effect, we’re going into another Brexit election in Northern Ireland within unionism,” he said.
Robinson, an MP who has only a slender majority in his East Belfast constituency, was formally confirmed on Wednesday night at the helm of the DUP.
He had been running the party on an interim basis since Sir Jeffrey Donaldson quit in March after being charged with historic sex offences.
Donaldson, who is not standing again as an MP and is next due in court in Northern Ireland on July 3, strenuously rejects the charges.
The DUP pulled out of the Stormont power-sharing executive between 2022 and 2024, triggering its collapse. The party had argued the Windsor framework deal that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak negotiated with the EU to iron out Brexit concerns did not go far enough.
Robinson was a key negotiator in an agreement that restored Stormont in February. The deal with the UK government reduced checks on the Irish Sea border and sought to “affirm Northern Ireland’s place in the Union”.
The executive is now led by the DUP’s rivals, the nationalist Sinn Féin party, for the first time in Northern Ireland’s history.
Political leaders in the region accused him of backtracking.
“You can smell the burning rubber all over the place from the U-turns,” said Eóin Tennyson of the cross-community Alliance Party, whose leader Naomi Long is running against Robinson in East Belfast.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has pledged a veterinary deal and other agreements with the EU to mitigate the effects of the border if his party wins power in Westminster.