Northern Ireland’s first minister on Friday said the European Union’s move to take legal action over alleged breaches of the Brexit divorce deal by the United Kingdom showed it was “only interested” in protecting itself, not the landmark 1998 Belfast peace agreement.

The EU said on Wednesday it would take legal action after the UK government unilaterally extended a grace period for checks on food imports to Northern Ireland, a move Brussels said violated the terms of the pact it brokered with London late last year.

“What they’re only interested in is protecting their bloc, they’re not interested, as they claim to be, in protecting the Belfast agreement,” Northern Ireland’s first minister told BBC radio.

“If they were, they would not be taking the action that they’re taking at present,” she added.

Foster, who heads the pro-unionist Democratic Unionist Party, said the purpose of the Brexit deal’s Northern Ireland Protocol was to stop goods from the UK entering the EU single market, but its effects, and the action taken in both London and Brussels, were “totally disproportionate” to the risks.

“We need [the protocol] to be replaced because certainly extending grace periods are only sticking plasters to what are really fundamental problems in terms of trade,” she said.

“There is a fundamental misunderstanding with the European Union as to the damage that they are doing.”

Since the EU’s promise of legal action, Northern Irish loyalist paramilitary groups have said they are temporarily withdrawing support for the 1998 peace agreement due to concerns over the Brexit deal.

Also known as the Good Friday agreement, the 1998 peace deal ended three decades of violence between mostly Catholic nationalists fighting for a united Ireland and mostly Protestant unionists, or loyalists, who want Northern Ireland to stay part of the UK.

The groups pledged “peaceful and democratic” opposition to the deal, stating they would not back it again until their rights were restored and the Northern Ireland Protocol was amended to ensure unfettered trade between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK