The DUP needs the UK government to demonstrate that Northern Ireland remains a “strong and integral” part of the UK, Chris Heaton-Harris has told an audience in London.
The Northern Ireland Secretary also said that he believes the Windsor Framework deals with the “fundamental” issues unionism had with the Northern Ireland Protocol.
Mr Heaton-Harris is engaged in negotiations with the DUP in efforts to convince the party to return to Stormont.
The unionist party have been boycotting the powersharing institutions for more than a year as a protest against post-Brexit trading arrangements.
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Northern Ireland secretary Chris Heaton-Harris @chhcalling addressing a packed room before being in conversation with @Emma_Norris
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The DUP disagreed with the protocol, first introduced by then prime minister Boris Johnson, on the grounds that it created a border in the Irish sea and distanced Northern Ireland from the UK internal market.
The Windsor Framework was British prime minister Rishi Sunak’s attempt to remedy the issues by reducing checks on goods between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.
The DUP have asked for legislative assurances of their constitutional position before re-entering Stormont.
Speaking at the Institute for Government in London, Mr Heaton-Harris said the UK government needed to reconfirm Northern Ireland’s position as a “strong and integral” part of the UK.
He said: “There was a court case in the Supreme Court that was about the Act of Union and how the Northern Ireland Protocol had subjugated that.
“We need to reconfirm essentially what’s in the Belfast/Good Friday agreement, that we’re proud to have Northern Ireland as a strong and integral part of the United Kingdom.
“And it will remain so until such time as the people of Northern Ireland decide otherwise.
“Now, I’ve said to my Democratic Unionist friends that I can say that on the floor of the house at the dispatch box, but I know it’s not enough for them just to hear it, so they need some sort of demonstration of that.”
Mr Heaton-Harris also said that he understood unionist fears surrounding the protocol and the reaction to the idea of being more tied to the EU than the UK economic market.
“Everyone knows – the Prime Minister said it when he launched the Windsor Framework in Parliament – that it’s not perfect, however, it goes a long, long way to solving lots of the practical issues that people were finding,” he said
“And let me try and describe what that felt like, if you’re a unionist in Northern Ireland and because of something called the Northern Ireland Protocol, and elements of it, businesses from Great Britain were beginning to remove goods from the shelves of Northern Ireland stores.”
He added: “So if you’re a unionist in Northern Ireland, you saw goods from Great Britain, disappearing from your shelves.
“Now they were replaced by other goods but from the European single market, and actually that was a physical demonstration in many unionist minds, I completely understand it, that Northern Ireland was being dragged out of the orbit of the UK’s internal market into the European single market.
“And so that had to be addressed, and it was no good for the Northern Ireland economy, it was no good for anybody.”
The Secretary of State also said the Windsor Framework dealt with the “fundamental” issues unionism had with the protocol.
“Actually if you look at the Windsor Framework, it doesn’t dabble just with the, kind of the top layer of the issues that Northern Ireland has with the protocol,” he said.
“It does deal with many of the fundamental pieces, and stuff that was going to come forward because the protocol had not been fully enacted.
“We’ve had grace periods that were coming to an end, infractions with the European Union that would have gone further, bad blood accumulating.
“And so we needed to find solutions, if possible, to all of that. And so the (Windsor) Framework went a lot further than I think, even I appreciated at the time.”
