Paul Murphy, who played a key role in the 1998 peace breakthrough, will recommend possible changes to how Northern Ireland enforces EU goods law—and, to unionist dismay, polices goods coming from Britain.
DUBLIN — Paul Murphy, a former Northern Ireland secretary who played a key but under-appreciated role in delivering the Good Friday peace deal, has been appointed to lead a formal review into the region’s endlessly disputed post-Brexit trade rules.
The genial Welshman — a former Labour MP now in the House of Lords as Lord Murphy of Torfaen — will have six months to report his findings to Downing Street and Stormont.
The review is a U.K. government commitment flowing from its 2019 Withdrawal Agreement with the European Union. Its Irish trade protocol specified that Northern Ireland, unlike the rest of the U.K., should continue to enforce European goods rules to maintain barrier-free trade with the neighboring Republic of Ireland, an EU member.
Northern Ireland’s British unionists, who mostly backed Brexit but loathe the new restrictions on goods coming from Britain, spent two years sabotaging regional government at Stormont in protest. They relented in early 2024 after the protocol rules were eased and, mostly, repackaged in two unionist-wooing agreements: the Windsor Framework and Safeguarding the Union.
One element of the original protocol that didn’t change was its requirement for Stormont to hold a 2024 vote on keeping the post-Brexit trade rules in place. That happened last month, passing easily with majority backing from Irish nationalists and the middle-of-the-road Alliance Party — but garnering not a single vote from the unionist minority.
Because the trade rules failed to win cross-community backing, the U.K. government is organizing a review into possible improvements that would, somehow, placate the unionist side of the house.
Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn announced Thursday that Murphy will lead that review and report findings by July. Unionist hardliners immediately denounced Murphy as a Remoaner and Europhile.
Jim Allister, the Traditional Unionist Voice leader who won a British parliamentary seat in last year’s election, noted that the review’s terms of reference require that any proposed changes to Northern Ireland’s trade rules win backing from both sides at Stormont. Given the region’s polarized and sectarian politics, this would give the Irish nationalist side led by Sinn Féin an effective veto, he argued.
“Far from providing a path to change, the review outcome is tethered to nationalist consent. Once more unionists are being treated as fools,” Allister said.
But Murphy built a reputation for even-handedness and attention to detail during his previous career at Stormont, where he served as Mo Mowlam’s deputy as Northern Ireland secretary during the 1997-98 negotiation of the Good Friday deal.
While the outspoken and eccentric Mowlam garnered the headlines, Murphy spent months away from the spotlight leading the U.K. government’s team in the crucial “strand two” of negotiations. These spelled out how a future cross-community administration for Northern Ireland would coordinate cross-border policies with the government in Dublin — an agenda long opposed, but grudgingly accepted in the end, by most unionists.
Such bridge-building between the two parts of Ireland became a cornerstone of the Good Friday compromise package. But it was undermined first by Brexit, with its threat to make the Irish border “hard” again, followed by the unionists’ two-year shutdown of Stormont, which also torpedoed political cooperation with Dublin.
Murphy — who also served as Northern Ireland secretary from 2002 to 2005 during the first protracted collapse of Stormont — is already on the record describing the trade protocol, and particularly the Windsor Framework rejig, as a necessary policy to limit Brexit-related shockwaves in Ireland.
In his 2024 Lords speech lauding the deal negotiated by then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak that finally got Stormont restored, Murphy rejected unionists’ claims that Northern Ireland should have the same trade rules as Britain. He said there had always been checks and restrictions on goods movements dating to Northern Ireland’s foundation in 1921 shortly before the rest of Ireland won independence from Britain.
“The idea that somehow or other Northern Ireland should not be different really is nonsense,” Murphy said then. “Northern Ireland is different in all sorts of ways.”
