She had been due to arrive in Hillsborough, County Down, on Wednesday where she was scheduled to meet locals including schoolchildren after the village was officially named Royal Hillsborough. It is the first village or town in Northern Ireland to be granted royal status.

She was also due to attend a church service in Armagh on Thursday to mark the centenary of Northern Ireland's formation.

Political leaders wished her well following the cancellation. The Northern Ireland secretary, Brandon Lewis tweeted: "Wishing Her Majesty the Queen all the very best as she takes a few days' rest. I look forward to meeting her in Northern Ireland in the future."

...
Church leaders expressed their sorrow after learning she would not be coming to Northern Ireland.

You are absolutely right. The GFA's final arbiter is the ECJ. The UK wants to pretend that that the border is a UK-only issue, but it's not. The Republic is equally involved and the official counter-party is the EU. To believe that a British High Court under the aegis of UK Home Secretaries who have made no secret of their willingness to put a thumb on the scales to get a  desired result would be a natural repository for decisions on an EU matter beggars belief.

Especially when the official guarantor of the deal is the USA who have made it very plain that no change is the desired result

keep to the Fen Causeway

Event goes ahead without heads of state of either Ireland or United Kingdom

The Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh has said he is "sorry" church leaders "didn't do more to become peacemakers, or at least speak peace into the situation.

"Too often we allowed the attitudes of the societies around us which we serve us to shape us rather than the other way round," Reverend John McDowell said.

Archbishop McDowell was delivering a reflection at a church service in Armagh to mark 100 years since the partition of Ireland and the foundation of Northern Ireland.

The harsh truths of partition in Ireland can't be avoided in the name of reconciliation | Brian Hanley [_link]

— Guardian Opinion (@guardianopinion) October 21, 2021

Steve Bell on the missing guests at Northern Ireland's centenary - cartoon

Northern Ireland Protocol problems 'need to be resolved by autumn' | BBC News |

Horizon membership

He also told MPs that the EU still had not ratified the UK's associate membership of Horizon, the science funding scheme.

Lord Frost said the government was "getting quite concerned about this" and that it raised "questions of good faith".

"It was agreed at the end of last year that we would be able to participate in Horizon/Copernicus and so on and the only reason it wasn't finalised fully at the time was because the EU had not put in place its own legislation," he said.

"So we were waiting for that to happen and it has now happened and there's absolutely no reason why we shouldn't be fully part of Horizon and indeed the EU has put in place these arrangements for Norway, for Iceland and for the Ukraine."

"It obviously would be a breach of the treaty if the EU doesn't deliver on this obligation."

EU Horizon approval delays hurting British research and business

The European Scrutiny Committee Brexit Divorce Bill Report reveals that UK businesses and research institutions will face increasing opportunity costs while they are frozen out of new projects. EU approval for the UK's participation is tied to the outcome of Northern Ireland Protocol negotiations, according to EU research commissioner Mariya Gabriel. Negotiations on the operation of the Protocol began earlier this month.

In December, the European Union provisionally agreed to the UK participating in its new research programmes, notably the flagship "Horizon Europe" research fund and the Copernicus earth observation programme, in return for a proportional contribution to the programme's funding. However, the protocols in the Agreement enabling UK entities to bid for funding have yet to be approved by the EU.

European Court of Justice 'not the only NI Protocol problem'

A former top British diplomat in Washington has accused Boris Johnson's government of damagingly downplaying the impact of Brexit on Northern Ireland's "delicate peace process" in statements intended for an American audience.

Alexandra Hall Hall, the lead Brexit envoy to the US who quit her job in late 2019 because she was unwilling to "peddle half-truths on behalf of a government I do not trust", has condemned Mr Johnson's government for being "wilfully disingenuous" in the official messages she was asked to deliver about Brexit in the US.

In a lengthy article published in a US academic journal, the former career diplomat excoriated the UK government for downplaying the cost and impact of Brexit in "public talking points" aimed at presenting the official UK government line in Washington.

"They downplayed the increased friction that was likely for businesses trading between the United Kingdom and the EU countries as well as third countries such as the United States, " wrote Ms Hall Hall in the Texas National Security Review journal.

"But, most damagingly, the talking points also downplayed the consequences of Brexit for the delicate peace process in Northern Ireland, in which the United States was a core stakeholder, having helped to broker the [Belfast] Agreement and supported it since then," she wrote.

Ms Hall Hall wrote that one colleague at the UK embassy in Washington working on Northern Ireland was "nearly in tears" as he "could not get his minister to register the enormous damage that would be done to the fabric of Northern Ireland, politically and economically, if the United Kingdom left the European Union without a deal".

"A low point for me was when I heard a senior British minister openly and offensively, in front of a US audience, dismiss the impact of a no-deal Brexit on Irish businesses as just affecting `a few farmers with turnips in the back of their trucks,' " she wrote.