UK and European Union negotiators are nearing a provisional agreement on post-Brexit arrangements for Northern Ireland, putting them in touching distance of a final settlement after years of often fraught talks, people familiar with the matter said.
(Bloomberg) — UK and European Union negotiators are nearing a provisional agreement on post-Brexit arrangements for Northern Ireland, putting them in touching distance of a final settlement after years of often fraught talks, people familiar with the matter said.
The two sides have been locked in intensive negotiations for weeks and officials are close to finding solutions at a technical level covering most pending issues, including on customs, state aid and sanitary checks on agri-food goods, according to the people, who spoke anonymously about talks that haven’t concluded.
While details are close to being ironed out, there are still differences to be resolved at a political level, particularly on governance, they said. One of the people cautioned that the remaining challenges were politically the most complicated to sort out.
Nevertheless, progress could be sufficient for announcements to be made in the next 10 days before a final push, they said.
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A deal would still need the endorsement of political parties on all sides, and the risk for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is that if enough unionists in Northern Ireland or Brexit-supporting Conservative MPs in Westminster come out in opposition, any agreement could still founder.
How to communicate and package the progress made on the various arrangements is among the negotiators’ considerations, another person said.
A UK government official said negotiators were still in a scoping phase and discussions were ongoing. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris and European Commission Vice-President Maros Sefcovic are keeping in regular touch, they added.
“Our work on scoping potential solutions is continuing. There are issues that remain open,” a spokesman for the EU Commission said.
Tunnel Vision
Expectations of a deal have been rising in recent weeks, after the EU agreed to use a real-time UK database tracking goods moving over the Irish sea border. That allowed the two sides to enter a negotiating “tunnel” where talks intensify and external communications are kept to a minimum in order to make progress.
The two sides want to unlock a comprehensive deal by the end of February, ahead of the April anniversary of the 1998 Belfast peace agreement, Bloomberg previously reported. A resolution would end the drawn-out dispute over the Northern Ireland Protocol, part of the wider Brexit deal signed in 2020, which was drawn up to avoid a land border on the island of Ireland.
That effectively placed a frontier in the Irish Sea — allowing Northern Ireland to remain in the EU single market. But it has disrupted trade between Northern Ireland and Great Britain because of the burden of new paperwork and customs procedures.
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The UK government and Northern Ireland unionists also don’t like that the protocol effectively creates an internal border within a sovereign country, with the European Court of Justice overseeing large parts of the arrangement.
The UK is particularly anxious to get a deal that satisfies the Democratic Unionist Party, which has consistently opposed the protocol and insists on keeping ties between Great Britain and Northern Ireland as close as possible.
The DUP has for almost a year blocked the formation of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government, in protest at the terms of the original Brexit deal. Heaton-Harris has opted not to call an election in the region immediately to break the impasse, indicating that progress in negotiations may help resolve the situation.
Though Sunak has won the political backing of opposition Labour leader Keir Starmer, who pledged his support for any eventual deal, he’ll be reluctant to not to exacerbate unrest in his own fractious party by agreeing to a deal that will upset his Brexit-supporting MPs.
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