MPs pass legislation aimed at reviving Northern Ireland executive

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Legislation to simplify crucial Brexit trade rules for Northern Ireland and reaffirm its position as part of the UK was approved by MPs in Westminster on Thursday, paving the way to end two years of political paralysis in the region.

The government had drawn up the changes — outlined in a 76-page Command Paper called “Safeguarding the Union” — together with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist party to address its objections to a customs border in the Irish Sea that it said inhibited trade with the British mainland and undermined the region’s place in the UK.

The vote in the House of Commons will allow Northern Ireland’s Stormont power-sharing executive to reconvene as early as Saturday. This will end a nearly two-year hiatus triggered by bitter unionist divisions over the trade border in the Irish Sea created by the UK’s Brexit deal with the EU.

Ireland’s Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said in Brussels on Thursday that the EU had some questions about the deal but added that nobody at this stage had raised “any red flags or anything that gives us major concern”.

The resumption of Stormont’s power-sharing executive after a near two-year DUP boycott will be a historic moment. Michelle O’Neill will become the first pro-Irish unity nationalist first minister in a region partitioned from the rest of the island more than a century ago for the then protestant unionist majority.

O’Neill, who is deputy leader of Sinn Féin, which is now the largest party on both sides of the Irish border, has vowed to be a “first minister for all”.

Under the power-sharing agreement, created by the 1998 Good Friday peace deal that ended three decades of conflict in the region, the post of deputy first minister, which has equal legal status, will now go to the DUP, after the region’s largest unionist party came second in the last…