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DUBLIN — The anti-Catholic extremists who once terrorized Northern Ireland’s streets are casting an intimidating shadow over the unsettled Brexit trade deal.
Council staff running EU food and animal health checks on goods arriving from Britain were withdrawn indefinitely from duty overnight at the Port of Larne north of Belfast. The reason? Paramilitary outlaws in the overwhelmingly Protestant town have branded them traitors worthy of assault or worse.
Their bigger target is the Northern Ireland protocol that has shifted EU-U.K. customs checks away from the land border with the Republic of Ireland and into Northern Ireland’s four major ports.
While that move reduced the risks of reviving Irish Republican Army attacks against border installations, it has heightened tensions in militant Protestant circles, where the protocol — which has raised regulatory barriers on everything from Scottish seed potatoes to British Army equipment — is seen as a threat to the unity of the United Kingdom.
Those operating the newly opened Border Control Post at the Port of Larne, including a dozen environmental health officers, appealed for protection after experiencing verbal taunts and threatening graffiti. One reads, “All border post staff are targets.”
The local 40-member council voted Monday night to withdraw its staff from potential harm until better security arrangements could be established.
Mayor Peter Johnston, a Democratic Unionist, said port staff must be withdrawn “with immediate effect, until we have very real assurances and full confidence that they can go about their duties without fear.”
James McKeown, one of only two members of the Irish nationalist Sinn Féin party on the council, agreed that port staff should resume their jobs “only when we are totally satisfied it is safe.”
Larne is a touchstone for the ethnic-religious tensions that spurred the creation of Northern Ireland as a Protestant-majority state a century ago.
It twice has played a key role in thwarting Irish nationalist ambitions — first in 1914 when 25,000 British Army rifles and 3 million rounds of ammunition were illegally landed at the port to arm Protestants opposed to Irish self-rule; and in 1974 when the workforce at Larne’s power station blacked out Northern Ireland for days as part of a successful campaign to collapse the territory’s first fleeting Protestant-Catholic government.
Today, Larne remains a stronghold for two outlawed gangs, the Ulster Volunteer Force and Ulster Defence Association, which between them killed about 1,000 people — mostly Catholic civilians — during three decades of tit-for-tat slaughter known as The Troubles.
These paramilitary forces were supposed to have faded away because of the 1998 Good Friday peace accord, but they remain active today in working-class Protestant communities as sectarian power-brokers and racketeers. They still reserve the right to threaten whomever they want, as evidenced when a UDA mob attacked Larne homes in 2014.
The Mid and East Antrim Council, which includes Larne, said in a statement that “the upsurge in sinister and menacing behavior” in the town had “caused extreme distress and worry to staff.” It pledged to develop a risk assessment plan with the police, Food Standards Agency and agriculture officials.
Democratic Unionists, who backed Brexit but loathe the reality of an Irish Sea customs border, said the Larne intimidation reflects rising Protestant antipathy to the protocol — a mood they intend to harness to undermine the viability of customs checks.
Northern Ireland’s agriculture minister, the Democratic Unionists’ Edwin Poots, tweeted that he would suspend agricultural inspections both at Larne and in Belfast Harbour, where he ordered inspectors withdrawn. “There [sic] safety remains paramount,” he wrote.
The Department of Agriculture declined to clarify whether inspections would shift to other ports at Warrenpoint or Londonderry, or whether food and animals arriving in Belfast and Larne might be waved through unchecked to avoid supply-chain gridlock.
“The protocol was bound to end in tears,” said Ian Paisley Jr., a Democratic Unionist member of the U.K. parliament, responding to news of staff withdrawals from ports.
“Those who thought they could impose something against the will of every unionist are now reaping the seeds of division they have sown,” said Paisley, who called on Prime Minister Boris Johnson to invoke Article 16 of the protocol to end enforcement of EU customs requirements on Northern Irish soil.
With no hint of irony, he said the U.K. must resume “proper trade without restrictions.”
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