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LONDON, March 19 (Reuters) – Anger in Northern Ireland’s unionist community over the implementation of the Brexit divorce deal is such that it could undermine stability so Britain had to act to extend the grace periods, British Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis said.
“If the unionist community feel that the Protocol is breaching the Good Friday agreement and moving away from the spirit of it, then we’re in quite a dangerous place in terms of stability of not just the executive but the north-south institutions,” Lewis told reporters.
Lewis said Britain had to take unilateral action to extend grace periods otherwise shelves would have been empty in shops in Northern Ireland.
“If we hadn’t, if we’d have had another set of empty shelves this week… the fallout from that in the unionist community means the Protocol would, I think, have been fatally flawed,” Lewis said.
The European Commission briefly threatened in January to impose emergency controls on vaccines crossing the land border, a step that Lewis said had ratchetted up tensions in the unionist community.
“We’re still dealing with the fallout from that,” Lewis said. (Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Kate Holton)