Ireland rejects post-Brexit border plan
The Republic of Ireland’s border with the British province of Northern Ireland is currently an internal EU frontier, but when Britain leaves the bloc, it will become subject to EU customs regulation.
With slow progress on agreeing Britains divorce bill, ensuring expatriates rights and deciding on the Irish border, the EU doubts it will give a green light in October for starting talks about the post-Brexit order, as had been planned.
Ireland dismissed British proposals for the Irish border after Brexit as unconvincing on Friday as concerns continue grow over the re-establishment of a physical border between the Irish Republic and the British province of Northern Ireland possibly reviving old tensions.
Britain has proposed an "invisible border" without border posts or immigration checks between the two after Brexit.
But London, which is still split on whether or not Britain will leave the EU customs union, has given no firm proposals on how the customs frontier between Northern Ireland and the Republic would be monitored.
"The maintenance of an invisible border on the island of Ireland would be a lot easier if Britain were to remain in the customs union," Ireland's Foreign Minister Simon Coveney told Reuters on Friday.
"Britain is the one leaving, they have an obligation to try and design unique solutions ... We cannot have a physical border on the island of Ireland again that creates barriers between communities," Coveney said.
The EU, which will have 27 member states after Brexit, wants to solve key exit issues before opening talks about any future trade cooperation with Britain. London says divorce talks should run in parallel with discussions about future ties.
"We cannot and will not support that and nor will the European Union," he said, adding that Britons wanted to avoid a hard border too. "The problem is that the solutions to actually get us there so far haven't been convincing."
Army and police checkpoints along the border were lifted some 20 years ago after a peace deal involving Dublin that ended a long civil conflict in Northern Ireland between British loyalists and Irish republicans.
On Thursday, the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier said Britain’s proposals on the border would undermine the bloc's single market.
He accused Britain of wanting the EU to "suspend the application of its laws" as a test case for broader EU-British customs regulations. "This will not happen," he added.
Negotiations to extricate Britain from the EU have seen a slow start and the EUs chief negotiator Michel Barnier has repeatedly warned that time is running out to answer complex questions before Britain is due to leave in March, 2019.
The European Parliament's chief Brexit speaker, Guy Verhofstadt, also dismissed Britain's plans for an "invisible border" as surreal.
But asked if he was confident that Britain would get a deal with the EU, Britain’s Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Tallinn: "Absolutely, with rock solid confidence."
He reiterated London's stance that the divorce talks should run together with discussion about the post-Brexit relationship.
"Article 50 makes it very clear that the discussion about the exit of a country must be taken in context with discussion of the future arrangements. And that's what we're going to do," he said.
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