Johnson’s claim about EU blockade ‘simply not true’ — Ireland

LONDON: Ireland yesterday dismissed a claim by Prime Minister Boris Johnson that the EU is plotting destabilising new barriers between Britain and Northern Ireland, as Brexit talks turn increasingly heated.

“That’s simply not the case,” Irish Justice Minister Helen McEntee told Sky News. “Any suggestion that this is going to create a new border is simply not true,” she said.

McEntee said that provisions for Northern Ireland in Britain’s EU withdrawal treaty were agreed by both sides to ensure fair competition after Brexit, and to comply with a 1998 peace pact that ended three decades of unrest in the province.

The treaty also “ensures the integrity of Northern Ireland as part of the UK”, she said, and it “ensures we do not see any kind of a border re-emerging”.

Writing in Saturday’s Daily Telegraph newspaper, Johnson had accused the EU of threatening to tear the UK apart by imposing a food “blockade” between Britain and Northern Ireland. “We are being told that the EU will not only impose tariffs on goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, but that they might actually stop the transport of food products from GB to NI,” he wrote.

“I have to say that we never seriously believed that the EU would be willing to use a treaty, negotiated in good faith, to blockade one part of the UK, to cut it off, or that they would actually threaten to destroy the economic and territorial integrity of the UK.”

Johnson said the EU’s stance would “seriously endanger peace and stability in Northern Ireland”.

“We disagree,” former prime ministers Tony Blair and John Major, who led Britain through historic peace talks in the 1990s, retorted in the Sunday Times.

“The government’s action does not protect the (1998) Good Friday Agreement — it imperils it,” they wrote in a joint opinion piece, calling Johnson’s claims to have only belatedly unearthed problems in the EU treaty “nonsense”.