‘Border deal will be in agreement’
Coveney happy with legal text after Barnier meeting
COMMITMENTS on the Irish border will be ‘accurately reflected’ in a legal document to be published tomorrow, Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney has said.
The Tánaiste said Ireland is ‘happy with the text’ after meeting with EU lead Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier in Brussels yesterday.
Fears had been raised that the pledge made by Britain in December to maintain regulatory alignment with the EU if necessary to avoid a hard border in Ireland had been fudged, and would not be given a firm legal footing.
But Mr Coveney yesterday dismissed those fears, saying: ‘I think people will judge for themselves. I think they will see it’s an accurate reflection of what was politically agreed in December.’
In a phone call with UK prime minister Theresa May last night, the Taoiseach reiterated the necessity from the EU side to have the detail of the backstop option spelled out in the draft legal text of the Withdrawal Agreement.
Both Leo Varadkar and the Prime Minister said they want the options, as set out in the December Joint Report, to be examined in detail.
This would include the preferred route, Option A, which aims to find a solution to the border issue being found within the overall future relationship between the EU and the UK.
When phase one of the Brexit negotiations finished before Christmas, the Irish Government said it had secured ‘bullet-proof’ guarantees there would be no return to a hard border between the Republic and the North when the UK leaves Europe.
But those assurances were plunged into doubt by Mrs May’s insistence that the UK will leave the customs union and single market in order to sign trade deals in other parts of the world.
Such a scenario is not compatible with avoiding a hard border with the North.
Mrs May will set out the latest developments in her own plans for Brexit on Friday after a special Cabinet meeting on Thursday.
Mr Coveney said he and Mr Barnier, and by extension the EU, are of the ‘one mind’ when it comes to translating the political commitments of December into legal text. ‘No more, no less,’ he said in a tweet. Mr Coveney has confirmed that the legal text will be contained in a protocol agreement to run alongside the main withdrawal deal, but dismissed concerns that this diminished commitments on the border.
‘It makes sense when you’re dealing with one country specifically to have that in a protocol, there’s a lot of precedent for that,’ he said. ‘But it is very much part of the one withdrawal agreement.
‘There is a lot of detail on Ireland, as you would expect, because there was a lot of detail before Christmas in terms of the political agreement between the EU and the UK, in terms of how to deal with specific Irish issues as regards a default position.
‘But don’t forget that is Option C. Our preference will be to try and solve a lot of the Irish border issues and Irish issues through an option A, which hopefully we hear an awful lot more about from the British Prime Minister on Friday.’
The Tánaiste refused to be drawn on Mrs May’s confidence and supply agreement with the DUP.
He said: ‘We are not looking to try and put pressure on anybody. We are simply looking to translate into a clear, legal language a text that has already been agreed politically before Christmas.
‘That has to happen at some point in time.’
‘We’re not looking to put pressure on’