The Republic of Ireland’s foreign minister, Simon Coveney, has said that he does not expect issues around the Northern Ireland Protocol to be resolved before the key date of October 28.
The Northern Ireland Protocol is the mechanism within the UK’s Brexit deal that ensures there is no hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, but means that checks must take place on goods moving from Great Britain into Northern Ireland.
Unionists feel that the Protocol undermines Northern Ireland’s place in the UK and must therefore be resolved. As an act of protest against its workings, the Democratic Unionist Party [DUP] refused to enter a power-sharing executive with Irish nationalist party Sinn Fein after the Assembly elections back in May, which has left the country without a functioning government.
If the executive cannot be restored by October 28, Northern Ireland secretary Chris Heaton-Harris must call a new election. He has distanced himself from any suggestion that the late October deadline could be pushed back and insisted that the election will go ahead if Protocol talks do not yield a breakthrough by then.
The UK and the EU held talks on Thursday afternoon in a bid to hasten progress, with further negotiations to come. Coveney (pictured) met with UK foreign secretary James Cleverly as part of the wider discussions.
Going into the talks, Coveney told Ireland’s parliament, the Dail Eireann, that he did “not believe it's going to be possible to resolve the issues linked to the implementation of the protocol by October 28.”
Irish taoiseach (prime minister) Micheál Martin, also suggested that although both sides wanted a negotiated solution, it would be challenging to find a landing zone.
Yet, Coveney did suggest that he felt there was “significant progress” to be made on some of the issues that really matter to the people of Northern Ireland - in particular to the unionist community and the business community.”
In the talks with Cleverly, Coveney said that he'd discussed "Brexit, the Protocol, the war in Ukraine as well as our shared work at the UN Security Council," posting on social network, Twitter, afterwards.
He continued: "We agreed to work closely together on all."
Cleverly separately said: "As our closest neighbour, I am committed to working with Ireland on important issues including energy security and fixing the problems with the Northern Ireland Protocol."
Coveney will be in London on Friday for a meeting of the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference, which was set-up to foster co-operation between the UK and Ireland.
Northern Ireland secretary Heaton-Harris said earlier this week that he was “very confident” of the UK and EU reaching an agreement, and that a deal would be supported by the DUP.
Meanwhile, the controversial Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which would give UK ministers the power to unilaterally override parts of the Protocol in the absence of an agreement with Brussels, returns to Parliament to be debated in the House of Lords next week.
Having been introduced in June when incumbent prime minister Liz Truss was foreign secretary, the EU announced legal action against the UK the following month arguing that it contravened international law.
The taoiseach declined to say on Thursday whether he felt that pausing the Bill's passage through Parliament would help the UK-EU negotiations.
Image by U.S. Department of Agriculture on Wikimedia Commons
