The votes counted and the seats filled, the postmortems completed and the topography of a new political landscape clear, the key questions for Northern Ireland now shift to discussions on the protocol between the EU and the UK, with a six-month deadline for completion. If past performance is any guide to future outcome, it’ll go all the way to the wire. In Dublin, one senior official grimaces: “It’ll be a rough few months.”
DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson told the Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis on Monday morning what he already knew: that there would be no Executive without action on the Northern Ireland protocol.
