Ireland cannot agree to British prime minister Boris Johnson's demands just for his "political convenience", Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney has said.
The Tánaiste strongly criticised Mr Johnson’s aggressive approach, saying Ireland would not take its instructions from Number 10 just because of the threat of havoc all round.
“What we are not in the business of doing is essentially being told by a British prime minister that this is the way it is now, and that because of the British parliament insisting on something, that everybody else then has to accept that, or else the house of cards gets pulled down for everybody,” he told the Sunday Business Post.
Mr Coveney, who has just returned from a week-long tour of EU capitals, said support for Ireland was solid across the bloc, despite the efforts by the UK to split EU leaders.
“There isn’t a single EU member state putting pressure on Ireland to move away from that position, despite the fact that the UK has spoken to all of them and used all of the persuasion that they can muster to actually move countries away from that position,” he said.
He explained that dropping the backstop now just to deliver a UK domestic agenda would just mean storing up problems in Ireland for decades.
“I’m not going to pretend to people that we can do that for political convenience now to get a deal, and then find that Irish politics is dominated by the border issue indefinitely into the future. We’re not doing that,” he said.
"That is essentially transferring a problem that has been created by Brexit, by a decision by the UK, and transferring it to Ireland on a permanent basis, post-Brexit," he said.
On Wednesday he and Stephen Barclay clashed at a Paris conference after the Brexit secretary criticised the original sequencing of talks, demanding the backstop should be dumped from the withdrawal agreement and made part of future trade talks instead.
Mr Coveney’s remarks chimed with those of EU negotiator Michel Barnier in the Sunday Telegraph, who expressed frustration with how Brexit negotiations were being spun.
“I think it is worthwhile to point out that there remain many misrepresentations about the solution we have found to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland. The backstop is all about managing the unique risks that Brexit creates in Northern Ireland, a fact that prime minister Boris Johnson recognises,” said Mr Barnier.
The Brexit negotiator said after “intense” negotiations with EU leaders over the threat an open border in Ireland posed to the security of the single market, “the backstop is the maximum amount of flexibility that the EU can offer to a non-member state.”–Guardian
