Editorial: Essays on the 1998 agreement anniversary have helped show why unionist views might be hardening

An opinion poll has supposedly found a hardening of unionist attitudes on the Northern Ireland Protocol. There is a deluge of surveys finding this thing and that, and their overall findings need to be treated with caution. Often respondents give answers that contradict other answers, particularly when it comes to a matter as poorly understood as the Irish Sea trade border.

Yet it is not difficult to understand a wider sense of concern within unionism in recent years. The introduction of an internal UK frontier for goods in order to ensure no change to the open nature of the Irish land border is merely the most obvious reason for unionist disillusion. But that happened against a backdrop of perpetual pressure for concessions to nationalism.

For the entire month of April we have been running a series of essays on the 25th anniversary of the Belfast Agreement, and those essays are spilling into this month. As the only unionist daily newspaper in Northern Ireland, we have given plenty of space to the range of unionist views on 1998 and its aftermath. But we have also run essays from other viewpoints, including two ex Taoisigh (Irish prime ministers) John Bruton and Bertie Ahern. It was most interesting to hear their analysis of the Belfast Agreement and its outworking.

A striking feature of current unionist sentiment is the feeling that the 1998 settlement has panned out in an anti unionist way. Today our essay is from Dr Graham Gudgin, a former advisor to David Trimble who says it was always going to be so. This paper supported the deal back then but shares the concern that it has been subtly hijacked as if it means parity of esteem on sovereignty, which it doesn’t. Only London can properly respond to this, above all by changing the culture of the Northern Ireland Office, so that it explicitly pushes for NI as part of the UK.