What the commentators said

“When people are screwing up, they tend to take their rage out on their nearest and dearest,” said Fintan O’toole in The Irish Times. Hence the fury directed at Dublin for daring to make clear that an open border with Northern Ireland is, for the Republic, a vital national interest. The Sun advised the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, to “shut his gob and grow up”. And rightly so, said James Forsyth in The Spectator. It’s outrageous for Dublin to demand that the UK erect an internal customs border. A mere 15% of Northern Irish exports go to the Republic – whereas 60% go to the rest of the UK. “It is often said that this idea is a non-starter because of Theresa May’s reliance on the DUP”, but “no decent UK government” could agree to such a demand.

The Irish border issue is “largely an invented problem”, said Andrew Lilico on Reaction.life. People say a hard border would be unavoidable if the province were to leave the customs union, but that’s nonsense. Although physical border posts are generally the most convenient way for countries to carry out customs checks, there’s no reason why laws can’t be enforced away from the border through random inspections of offices, audits and other means. That may be true in theory, said Alan Beattie in the FT, but it wouldn’t work in practice. Apart from anything else, Dublin would be liable in the European Court of Justice if it were seen to have breached the integrity of the single market by failing properly to control its border.

So how will this deadlock be solved? Many experts involved in the process believe the “political and commercial logic” points to an “east-west” border, rather than a “north-south” one, said Peter Foster in The Daily Telegraph. As one UK official privately observes, installing numberplate recognition cameras at Holyhead and Fishguard – where “no one is going to shoot the cameras out in the middle of the night” – is easier than in the Irish borderlands. Unionists fiercely object to the idea of Northern Ireland becoming a regulatory “exclave” of the EU, but the province, with its dual citizenship and policing arrangements, already has a “special status” within the UK. “Some form of unique new settlement for Northern Ireland seems inevitable.”