Brexit: EU’s Irish border plan ‘is not fair’, DUP says

Arlene Foster met with chief negotiator Michel Barnier in Brussels

The EU’s proposals to solve the Brexit Irish border issue are not “fair” and actually backtrack on what was agreed with the UK in December, the DUP have told the bloc’s chief negotiator in a face-to-face meeting in Brussels.

Senior figures from the Northern Irish unionist party including leader Arlene Foster met with Michel Barnier on Tuesday to raise their concerns about the Brexit process, following his meeting with Sinn Fein on Monday.

Speaking at a news conference following the meeting Ms Foster said that she had told Mr Barnier that “the draft EU legal text was not a faithful or indeed fair legal interpretation of the joint report from December”.

Though she described the meeting as “a good and very open meeting”, she said that “the current draft legal text has omissions in it, it also overreaches in other areas”.

The DUP is concerned that the EU’s legal text did not include a clause included in December to “ensure the same unfettered access for Northern Ireland's businesses to the whole of the United Kingdom internal market” – and instead implied there could be controls between Northern Ireland and Great Britain as part of a common regulatory area on the island of Ireland.

Adding that she hoped for a “sensible” Brexit, she added: “He has put forward an EU draft text that not only we find unacceptable, the British government finds unacceptable, the Labour party finds it unacceptable, so there will be a need to negotiate from that.

“That is his interpretation, we don’t think it’s a fair interpretation of the joint report from December and therefore work needs to be done on this now.”

Traffic crosses the border into Northern Ireland from the Irish Republic next to a poster protesting against a hard Brexit (Getty)

“There are three options in relation to future relations, this [legal text] has only reflected the third of those options, it doesn’t reflect the first and second. What’s the point of having a joint agreement if it’s not then later replicated into the document?”

Nigel Dodds, the DUP’s leader in Westminster, added: “It’s somewhat ironic to talk about wanting to remove any checks between the border of NI and the Irish Republic and then the EU to suggest we should set up checks and another border between one part of the UK and another part of the UK. It’s driving a coach and horses through the EU’s principles of no hard borders.

He added that no unionist “could possibly ever support” the text, echoing Theresa May’s comments that now UK prime minister could ever support it. He also said that the proposals put forward by the EU would hurt Irish businesses because of the volume of trade conducted between Great Britain and the Republic.

Following the meeting, Mr Barnier said: “The EU is looking for practical solutions to avoiding a hard border, in full respect of the constitutional status of Northern Ireland, as set out in the Good Friday Agreement.”

An EU source familiar with the meeting said it was centred on the draft protocol and that Mr Barnier had simply repeated what he had said in public about the plans last week.