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Hello and welcome to a special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots.

I'm Katie Balls and I'm joined by James Forsyth and Dennis Staunton, the London editor of the Irish Times.

Last Friday, the EU triggered Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol. They

quickly withdrew that, however, after all sides of the political spectrum, condemned the use of

this in relation to vaccines. However, that's not the last of it, and we have seen an escalation

since then with Arlene Foster this week saying there's been a coming together

a unionism in recent days to oppose the Northern Ireland Protocol generally and the Prime

Minister criticising the EU during Prime Minister's questions. Just to start as off, Dennis,

where are we at at the moment? Because there are problems before Friday in terms of how the Northern Ireland

protocol is working. But yet, is it fair to say that this has led to an escalation in how it

is being seen on both sides? Yes, it has. First of all, the fact of what the European Commission

did on Friday night, even though they reversed it very quickly, it was so shocking because it

involved no consultation with any of the

affected parties. They didn't consult Dublin. They didn't consult the Irish European Commissioner,

Morade McGuinness. They didn't consult London. They consulted obviously nobody in Northern Ireland.

And the step they took was so dramatic that it was really, it was a very shocking thing to do.

So that highlighted the problems that were already there in terms of the way the protocol is working.

And then what happened was that Arlene Foster and the DUP, some of whom had been moving towards

working with the British government to try to make the protocol work a bit better and to solve the problems.

Suddenly, they found themselves under pressure in the polls by a more right-wing party

and also then under pressure from their own grassroots to take a much more hardline position.

...