The unionists warn Liz Truss that there will be major consequences if she doesn't meet the deadline to end negotiations with Brussels over the Northern Ireland protocol.
The foreign secretary had to provide a clear date for the end of the talks, according to Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the DUP leader. The warning came after Maros Sefcovic, the EU's chief negotiator, said last week that London had breached a great deal of trust with Europe over the protocol.
We need a clear date now, according to Donaldson. We need a timeline in which real progress can be made or the government takes the action that is necessary.
It is important that Liz Truss moves this process forward quickly and that we get real and meaningful progress on a number of issues, including removing the checks on the movement of goods within the UK internal market. Donaldson wouldn't specify a reasonable deadline for progress, but he added that January is going to be an absolutely crucial month. If we don't get rapid and decisive progress, and one side or the other is kicking the can down the road, this will have a major impact on the stability of the political institutions in Northern Ireland. Sefcovic told the German news website that problems with the protocol, which maintains a freeflowing land border on Ireland, caused the UK to break international law in trying to circumvent the arrangement.
He said he was pragmatic after the foreign secretary took over the responsibility for negotiations with the EU after Lord Frost resigned as Minister for Trade in the EU last month.
Sefcovic warned that if Truss were to invoke Article 16 and suspend the treaty between the EU and the UK, it would throw into jeopardy the foundation of the entire deal. One of the architects of the Northern Ireland peace deal, Jonathan Powell, claimed that neither Boris Johnson nor Frost understood the fragility of the Good Friday agreement.
Powell accused them of jeopardizing the work the previous generation of politicians put into the 1998 deal that ended the Troubles.
He also questioned why Frost was posturing on the issue of the European Court of Justice ECJ during the negotiations on the protocol.
The casual political vandalism is what worries me the most, Powell said. They don't seem to care. I mean the damage they are doing to the very fragile political settlements in Northern Ireland by posturing on things like the European Court of Justice, which does not matter to voters in Northern Ireland.
Is it worth it to sacrifice all the work that previous generations of politicians put into the peace process on the ideological altar of the ECJ?