OH DEAR! I’m sorry to read Richard Drax’s column in which he is banging the same old DUP drum.

I guess marching season is almost upon us and the Orange Order does so like to act in a threatening and triumphalist way over a battle fought 350 years ago.

I would like to remind readers that the Northern Ireland Protocol was negotiated with the EU by our present Government, who acted in a pretty triumphalist way about it at the time in their desperation to storm through with a hard Brexit.

Anyone could see at the the time that it would create a customs border in the Irish Sea.

Not, apparently, the Conservative Cabinet.

On April 7 this year the Irish News reported that “two-in-three businesses have now adapted to the Northern Ireland Protocol...” and “...those that reported significant challenges due to the protocol fell from 16 per cent to just eight per cent”.

Ordinary businesses seem to have been able to manage mountains of forms with absolutely no help from a PM who assured them there would be no paperwork.

I have to conclude that the British Government is now allowing itself to be used as a cudgel to back up the bully-boy tactics of a political party which is itself refusing to engage in any meaningful way in the government in Stormont.

Thus, the majority of the people of Northern Ireland are abandoned by any form of government at all. Please, please, please can we get back to the representation of decent people by decent people and stop our political representatives breaking laws and screaming nationalist nonsense to distract us all from their own moral vacancy?

 

AMANDA LUSTED

Love Lane

Weymouth