Could you call it the Belgium of Europe?
Irish reunification of 2024, anybody?
At this point, I’d put more money on The Troubles kicking off again.
That’s not happening anytime soon. Without Stormont no referendum can be called. And just because there was a Republican majority for the first time, doesn’t mean the majority of people here would support it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Northern Ireland’s environment is unlikely to benefit from higher EU standards because the country already flouts the existing rules, leaving it in a “grossly degraded” state, experts have said.
Poor governance subverted ambitious EU rules, said James Orr, director of Friends of the Earth in Northern Ireland.
Great Britain’s divergence from EU rules might leave Northern Ireland with higher standards, but that was of limited value when the region was an environmental “basket case”, said Orr.
Viviane Gravey, a politics lecturer and expert on EU environmental policy at Queen’s University Belfast, said the collapse of the Stormont executive and assembly had left the civil service struggling to fill the vacuum.
The DUP collapsed power-sharing in January 2022 in protest over the post-Brexit trading arrangements, which the party said weakened Northern Ireland’s place in the UK and left it under EU sway.
The party cites divergence between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK as justification for a continued boycott that has left the secretary of state, Chris Heaton-Harris, overseeing a civil service that runs the region on a type of auto-pilot, unable or unwilling to take major decisions.
The original article contains 775 words, the summary contains 189 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
