Ireland’s taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, is expected to express concerns that the British government is trying to wriggle out of its commitments to an invisible border when he meets Theresa May in Belfast on Monday afternoon.
Dublin is concerned that Brexiters in the Conservative party are trying to persuade May to row back on her commitment to the deal agreed in December that allowed for “full regulatory alignment” between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.
The bilateral talks have been arranged as part of the latest attempt to restore power-sharing in Northern Ireland, but Brexit is also high on the agenda.
Varadkar told RTÉ he need clarity from the British government about how it would translate the December deal into legal language in the draft withdrawal agreement that is due to be completed within weeks.
“The difficult part, and it was always going to be the difficult part, in phase two is the commitments and guarantees around the avoidance of a hard border,” Varadkar said. “What we’re trying to do … is ensure that what was agreed in December is now stitched into the legal text of the withdrawal agreement.”
Britain’s first position paper on the Irish border, published last August, proposed customs exemptions for small businesses and pre-clearance for large traders
as a way of avoiding “physical border infrastructure and border posts” or electronic surveillance.
However, critics said the proposals failed to take account of cross-border issues such as healthcare, car insurance and agrifood standards that are affected by EU legislation and the Good Friday agreement.
Sources say British negotiators did not come round to the Brussels and Irish position until the week before the December deal. That commitment now appears to be under threat. “They seem to have gone back to their August position paper,” said one source in Dublin.
Varadkar is expected to remind May that the December deal included a “no backsliding” commitment obliging both sides to convert the joint report into a draft treaty by March.
The agreement in December laid out three options for the border. The first two centred on the prospect of an overall UK/EU deal that would obviate the need for any special arrangements for Northern Ireland or a bespoke arrangement for the region.
In the event that neither of these were available, then both sides agreed to full regulatory alignment. It is this third option only that is now being legally codified in Brussels and which awaits agreement from London.
Michael D’Arcy, Ireland’s minister of state for finance, public expenditure and reform, said: “The UK government has given the undertaking and their word in December on a number of issues and they will be expected to honour that. The knew when they gave that commitment that the withdrawal bill must reflect that full regulatory alignment.”
The Irish senator Neale Richmond said: “We are wondering why are we going back to where we were at some months ago. [Those negotiations] are not going to be reopened and the internal machinations of the Tory party is a bit of a sideshow.”