Pressure on May to give Irish border guarantee
EU LEADERS lined up yesterday to tell Theresa May she needed to give guarantees on the Irish border before they would grant her the Brexit deal the prime minister wanted to avoid Britain crashing out of the bloc in March.
On a second day of summitry in Austria, May’s EU peers rammed home their message on her plea for them to ease up on a “backstop” plan dealing with the border between the British province of Northern Ireland and EU member state Ireland.
The backstop would keep Northern Ireland under EU economic oversight if London and Brussels could not agree on a trade pact to keep UK-EU borders open after a transition period ends in 2020 – an idea that May and a small party in the province that props up her minority government oppose.
“We have very clear principles regarding the integrity of the single market and regarding precisely the Irish border,” French President Emmanuel Macron told reporters at the summit in Salzburg. “We need a UK proposal precisely preserving this backstop in the framework of a withdrawal agreement.”
Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar had his own early morning meeting with May, after she had asked the summit over dinner the previous night not to ask her effectively to divide the UK.
But Varadkar warned Dublin was gearing up for talks to collapse without a deal if London refused to budge.
“We’re ready for that eventuality, should it occur. But I think we need to double our efforts over the next couple of weeks to make sure that we have a deal,” he said.
May tried to win over her 27 peers by asking them what they would do if they were asked to agree to a “legal separation” of their countries.
She maintained that the backstop would divide Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK in terms of customs if it were ever necessary to invoke it – even though both sides say they are | Reuters determined to keep their borders open to trade. Maintaining a united front that refuses to let May bypass the talks run by EU negotiator Michel Barnier, the 27 leaders did not respond to her. They discussed the issue among themselves over lunch yesterday, following a briefing from Barnier.
Diplomats said leaders agreed to hold their diaries for a possible final Brexit summit in Brussels on November 17 and 18.
However, French officials questioned the need to rush to set such a target date, and others involved are bracing for May to haggle down to the wire – sometime around the year’s end.
That could help her sell any deal back home as the best she could get without risking ending up with no deal at all, come March. | Reuters