Last week, the electors in the Irish Republic delivered a very timely rejection of Sinn Féin. The election cut that party down to size.

Then, on Saturday, its front organisation, Ireland's Future, had the disappointment of seeing more empty seats than filled seats at its latest jamboree in Belfast. Some were unable to attend, it seems. Alliance leader, Mrs Naomi Long, had more importance business: she had to ride the ghost train in Portrush. Maybe, of course, it was really because she did not want to frighten unionist-minded voters in East Belfast.

Unionists in Northern Ireland know and understand what the aggressive agenda of Ireland's Future is about, but there is something far more insidious in building that same all-Ireland. That is the protocol, which is now the dynamo driving an all-Ireland creation economy. That dynamo is fired by the fact that over 300 areas of law, many of which should rest with the House and touch on our agri-food industry, trade and much of our environment and economy, are now areas of law identical to the laws in the Irish Republic that are now provided by a foreign Parliament. That is the intended mechanism of the protocol: to build surreptitiously and on an ongoing basis an all-island economy, aided, of course, by the fact that, in the House, the Department for the Economy was surrendered to a Sinn Féin Minister. It is that, rather than the aggressive promotion of an all-Ireland through organisations such as Ireland's Future, which presents a far more dangerous and insidious threat to the Union, as well as the assault on basic democratic principles, whereby there is a disenfranchising of the people of Northern Ireland.

Although we are electing a sovereign Parliament, we elect one whose writ does not run on these areas in this part of the United Kingdom, because sovereignty in them has been surrendered to a foreign Parliament. That is something that many unionists are alert to, increasingly so.