Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tollhus, with me to discuss whether Rishi Sunak's reform of the Northern

Land Protocol will be enough to break the deadlock and get the power-sharing executive backup

and running at Stormont as our political editor, Adam Payne,

as well as the SDL-PMP, Claire Hanna, who represents Belfast South in the House of Commons,

and Baroness Angela Smith, Labour peer and shadow leader in the House of Lords, and a party spokesperson on Northern Ireland. So, we'll start with you, Adam. Last week, the Prime Minister

outlined his new Windsor framework. It feels almost already like a lifetime ago, but it was only 10 days ago. Explain for us just why this was such a big moment in this kind of drawn-out saga of dealing with the Brexit in Northern Ireland.

Thanks, Alan. It's good to be back on the podcast after a brief time away.

We're doing Brexit, so we've got to get you back on if it's Brexit. Absolutely. Well, it does feel like a bit of long time ago now, but it was early last week that the European

Commission President Ursula von der Leyen flew into the UK to have that press conference,

that meeting as well, with Rishi Sunak, and they're both signed off on this deal for Northern Ireland and reforming

the protocol that we've been expecting for a number of weeks. It is a big moment clearly because

it represents a big step towards repairing the relationship between the UK and the EU, which

has been in a bad place for a while. As well, the government very much hopes that

it will be enough to convince the Democratic Unionist Party that their concerns regarding

Northern Ireland's place in the Union have been addressed and that they will agree eventually

to return to power sharing in Northern Ireland.

Now, the deal itself, I guess there are two core elements of it, really, to try and put it in layman's terms.

Firstly, the number of checks carried out on stuff going from GB to NI is going to be reduced pretty dramatically.

And they're doing that through the creation of a green lane and a red lane.

In the green lane, you will have goods that are going from GB to N.I but staying in N.I.

And they will face very, very, very few checks.

...