Northern Ireland Agricultural Minister Edwin Poots has angered Irish nationalists and senior politicians in Dublin after he ordered a halt to all post-Brexit checks on agricultural food products coming from the UK.
The move by Edwin Poots, a member of the Democratic Unionist Party, is the latest complication in a long-running dispute between London and Brussels after the UK’s departure from the EU.
Mr Poots has ordered that the inspections end from midnight.
The checks were introduced under a post-Brexit protocol designed to prevent highly sensitive border checks between Northern Ireland and EU-member Ireland.
It is still unclear if those orders will be carried out by civil servants.
The DUP has opposed the checks set out by the protocol, which create a border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.
As part of the Brexit deal, the EU and UK agreed to keep Northern Ireland inside the bloc’s single market for goods to ensure an open border on the island of Ireland.
The open border is a key part of the peace process that brought decades of conflict to an end in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s.
Mr Poots, whose ministry is responsible for the checks, quoted legal advice that the measures should not have been introduced without approval from the regional government in Belfast.
Efforts between the UK and the EU to resolve the problems brought on by the protocol have failed to make much progress.
Unionists such as Mr Poots and the DUP criticise the protocol for undermining Northern Ireland’s place in the rest of the UK.
Ireland’s Foreign Minister, Simon Coveney, questioned the legality of Mr Poots's move.
“If a political decision is taken by a minister in Northern Ireland to stop all checks in ports on goods coming across the Irish Sea, coming into Northern Ireland, that is effectively a breach of international law," Mr Coveney said.
He told Ireland’s Parliament that “to deliberately frustrate obligations under that treaty, I think would be a very serious matter indeed.
“It’s essentially playing politics with legal obligations. And I certainly hope that it doesn’t happen, as has been threatened.”
The DUP runs Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government with the Irish nationalist party Sinn Fein.
Deputy First Minister Michelle O’Neill of Sinn Fein called the move by Mr Poots a “stunt” by the DUP “to unlawfully interfere with domestic and international law".
The UK government said the operation of the checks was a matter for the administration in Northern Ireland.
“We have been consistently clear that there are significant problems with the protocol that urgently need fixing, which is why we are in intensive talks with the EU to find solutions,” a representative said.
The DUP is behind Sinn Fein in opinion polls as Northern Ireland prepares for elections in May, and other parties accuse it of growing increasingly desperate on the protocol.
But the DUP insists that the EU agreement is a threat to Northern Ireland's pro-UK unionist population, and wants London to scrap it.
