Irish Examiner view: Time to be a school not a weak shoal

David Trimble: Northern Ireland Protocol is causing a breakdown in relationship with Britain.

Crisis and chaos have more or less the same relationship as a school of fish and a shoal of fish. One becomes the other when the calm shown by a school swimming in synchrony collapses under pressure. If that metaphor can be extended to human behaviour, stress, mistrust, visceral, unchanging antipathy, and the oldest toxin of all, hatred all play a part in turning a school into an everyone-for-themselves shoal. At that point, the fish become prey, hunted down by whatever entity undermined the collegiality and security of the school.

Extending that metaphor northwards it seems that Loyalism is, once again, straddling the line between a shoal and a school. This time, the catalyst is the Northern Ireland Protocol, a mechanism agreed by British prime minister Boris Johnson to get a Brexit deal ahead of the 2019 general election. That arrangement is, according to Unionist venerables, causing problems. One of the architects of the Good Friday Agreement and a man who made considerable sacrifices to achieve that accommodation, David Trimble has argued that not only does it destroy the North’s constitutional relationship with Britain, but it also is damaging the North’s fragile economy. As has nearly always been the case — and not just from Loyalism — those concerns are attended by the darkest threats even if not from Mr Trimble. Whether they can be made real is an open question but recent PSNI and MI5 reports, identified around 12,500 Loyalist paramilitaries. Of those 5,000 are affiliated with the Ulster Defence Association and 7,500 with the Ulster Volunteer Force. Why they should exist at all is a valid question. Are they an iteration of the Unionist veto that made 30 years of terrorism inevitable?