‘E.U. FULLY BACKING IRELAND’
EUROPE will not allow Ireland to be singled out if negotiations on the Northern Ireland Protocol end in failure, an EU commissioner has insisted.
Ireland’s representative in the European Commission, Mairead McGuinness, spoke of the potential impact of a breakdown in the Brexit rules designed to prevent a hard border.
The EU and UK are set for intense negotiations after Brussels published proposals aimed at reducing difficulties in moving goods from Britain to Northern Ireland.
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Notable improvement was seen in Tipperary town and in Carlow and Longford, which were both “cleaner than European norms.”
IBAL’s Conor Horgan said: “With local authority cleaning schedules normalising again and volunteer groups re- engaged in clean- ups across the country, our towns are almost as clean as two years ago.
“This is still some way short of where they were in 2014, however.”
By contrast, the majority of urban areas fared worse than in 2020, among them Dublin, Cork and Limerick City Centres, which were all deemed “littered”.
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Ms McGuinness told RTE One’s The Week In Politics it was more important to focus on getting a successful outcome to the talks than “what ifs” that may materialise if they fail.
Deal
However, she added: “At the end of the day if things break down and if there is a sense in which the United Kingdom is not prepared to agree to existing commitments or to reach an agreement on a new deal then of course Europe will have to act in Europe’s best interest.”
Ms McGuinness was asked whether Ireland would be the member state hardest hit.
“There certainly is a reality and my colleagues in Europe and around the Commission understand Ireland is in a very vulnerable position, because if things go wrong we could find ourselves in a difficult situation,” she said.
“I don’t find any sense amongst the member states that they want Ireland to be singled out or to be made feel vulnerable.
“But I would put a question to the UK side — I hope that’s not their intention, I hope they’re not using Ireland, as opposed to Northern Ireland, as a way to, if you like, reconfigure things, because that won’t wash well either.”
Ms McGuinness also said UK and EU relations would be in a “very, very difficult place” if there was truth in claims made by former Downing Street advisor Dominic Cummings that the UK government always intended to ditch the Protocol.