Ireland's PM says EU has upper hand in UK trade talks
Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar believes the European Union has the upper hand in upcoming trade negotiations with Britain after Brexit, he said in an interview broadcast on Monday.
Varadkar argued the size of the EU, which will comprise 27 countries once Britain has left on Friday, means it holds more sway in talks with London over their future relationship.
The Irish leader, who is fighting a general election on February 8, also cast doubt on finalising a free trade deal this year, as insisted on by his British counterpart Boris Johnson.
"We (the EU) have a population and a market of 450 million people. The UK, it's about 60 (million)," Varadkar told BBC television.
"So if these were two teams up against each other playing football, who do you think has the stronger team?"
Varadkar, who played a pivotal part in the first phase of UK-EU divorce talks, met the bloc's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier in Dublin on
Monday.
The Irish leader added in the interview that Brussels would not accept anything less than a comprehensive free trade agreement with Britain moving forward.
"When I hear people talk about piecemeal, it sounds a bit like cake and eat," he said, referring to securing only a partial deal by the end of the year.
"That isn't something that will fly in Europe."
London indicated earlier this month it could seek a piecemeal post-Brexit deal with the EU that leaves some issues unresolved but still lets it break free from the bloc at the end of the year.
Britain leaves the EU at 2300 GMT on Friday, when it will begin an 11month transition phase during which existing arrangements remain unchanged.
Johnson wants to agree the terms of the future relationship, modelled on the EU's free trade agreement with Canada, by the end of that period.
Varadkar said it would be "difficult to do this" but that Brussels "won't be dragging our feet".
Seventy-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz, a dwindling number of elderly Holocaust survivors gathered at the former German Nazi death camp on Monday to honour its more than 1.1 million mostly Jewish victims and to share their alarm over rising anti-semitism.
More than 200 survivors came from across the globe to the camp the Nazis built at Oswiecim in then-occupied Poland, to share their testimony as a stark warning amid a recent surge of anti-semitic attacks on both sides of the Atlantic, some of them deadly.
Survivors dressed in blue and white striped caps and scarves symbolic of the uniforms prisoners wore at the camp, passed through its chilling "Arbeit macht Frei" (German for "Work makes you free") black wrought-iron gate.
Accompanied by Polish President Andrzej Duda, they laid floral wreaths by the Death Wall in Auschwitz where the Nazis shot dead thousands of prisoners.
"We want the next generation to know what we went through and that it should never happen again," Auschwitz survivor David Marks, 93, said earlier at the former death camp, his voice breaking with emotion.
Thirty-five members of his immediate and extended family of Romanian Jews were killed in Auschwitz, the largest of Nazi Germany's camps that has come to symbolise the six million European Jews who died in the Holocaust.
From mid-1942 the Nazis systematically deported Jews from all over Europe to six camps-AuschwitzBirkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka.
Organisers insist that Monday's memorial ceremony must focus above all on what survivors have to say rather than the bitter political feuds that have tainted the run-up to the anniversary.
"This is about survivors, it's not about politics," Ronald Lauder, head of the World Jewish Congress, told AFP in the Auschwitz camp, now a memorial and state museum run by Poland. "We see anti-semitism rising now and we don't want their (survivors) past to be their children's future, or their grand children's future," he added.