It’s advantage Ireland as EU sets out position on Border

Analysis

IT SEEMS that Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s ‘bulletproof ’ Brexit Border guarantee has survived the final Brussels edit – but that moves Theresa May closer to the firing squad.

Yes, that is a pretty brutal analogy. But sometimes politics is exactly like that.

We already have the broadbrush version of what the British prime minister wants from the next phase of the Brexit negotiations. It is a ropey enough compromise put together by her cabinet, which is riven on the issue.

But from today we will know definitively what we have known for a long time now: the EU is not prepared to deal with Mrs May on those terms.

There was more than a sense of understatement when the Taoiseach yesterday told the Dáil that there were “an interesting few weeks ahead”.

The pace of the Brexit developments continued as British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson brushed aside fears that Brexit would create a hard Border.

He compared the Border with the boundary between two London boroughs of Camden and Westminster, where the traffic congestion charge is handled by smart technology. “There’s no border between Camden and Westminster,” Mr Johnson told BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme, as he recalled millions of revenue pulled in electronically when he was mayor of London.

Cue the outrage across both islands as he compared a borough boundary with the border between two separate jurisdictions, which is at risk of becoming an EU-UK international frontier.

Later the text of a leaked letter from Mr Johnson to Mrs May showed that he was contemplating a hard Border, as he wrote: “Even if a hard Border is reintroduced, we would expect to see 95pcplus of goods pass the Border [without] checks.”

It seems almost pointless to recall that in February

2016, ahead of the Brexit referendum, Mr Johnson insisted the Irish Border would be unchanged.

But the two incidents showed the extent of the lack of any confidence in Brussels that the UK is taking the Irish Border issue and its related commitments last December at all seriously.

At all events, by tea time some more details began to emerge from the document due before the policy-guiding EU Commission in Brussels today. It is billed as the draft “withdrawal agreement,” or WA, which is to be negotiated over the coming weeks.

The emerging details seemed more like a declaration of war between the EU and the UK.

In the immediate term it is good news for Leo Varadkar and Simon Coveney, and a blow to those in Fianna Fáil who had hoped they would be able to say they had over-sold what they had got in general terms on December 8 last.

The draft WA will set out one option as a single Irish regulatory space with no internal frontiers.

This would give effect to the so-called regulatory alignment, or backstop, with the North near enough staying as part of the EU customs union.

The Democratic Unionist Party will again cry out that Northern Ireland must leave the EU on exactly the same terms as England, Wales and Scotland.

Worse is the prospect of joint EU-UK customs checks.