Mistakes were made on all sides in handling Brexit and the resulting trade arrangements in the Northern Ireland protocol were “a little bit too strict”, said new Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar.
Speaking at an event in Dublin, Varadkar, who took over from Micheál Martin as Taoiseach in December, pledged to be flexible and reasonable in negotiations to reform the 2019 deal.
As it stands, the protocol also “worked without it being fully enforced,” he said, adding that this gave him cause to believe there is room for flexibility and change, and that EU negotiators also held this view.
For his part in the negotiation of the original deal, Varadkar has been hit with significant criticism by Northern Irish unionists opposed to the introduction of any trade barriers or checks between Northern Ireland and Britain.
The Taoiseach said that he had spoken to many people from a unionist background and that he understood how they felt about the protocol: “They feel that it diminishes their place in the Union, that it creates barriers between Britain and Northern Ireland that didn’t exist before.”
He added, however, that “that’s also true of Brexit”, which he said had been imposed on Northern Ireland “without cross-community consent, without the support of the majority of people in Northern Ireland.”
“A lot of people who are unionists feel that the protocol has separated them from Great Britain,” he said. “A lot of people from a nationalist background in Northern Ireland feel that it separated them from the rest of Ireland…there are two sides to this story.”
The negotiation of the original deal, Varadkar also said, was undertaken with the objectives of preventing a hard border, upholding human rights in Northern Ireland and protecting the European Single Market, all of which he described as his “firm red lines.”
“The backstop, the protocol, were just mechanisms to achieve those objectives,” he added. “So as long as we can achieve those objectives, I’ll be as flexible and reasonable as I can be.”
(Molly Killeen | EURACTIV.com)
Source: euractiv.com
