‘Intensive’ UK-EU negotiations over Northern Ireland to begin Friday

Yesterday evening the vice president of the European Commission Maroš Šefčovič outlined the EU’s intentions to concede on some elements of the Northern Ireland Protocol.

The Protocol was agreed by the EU and UK to prevent a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in the wake of Brexit by keeping Northern Ireland in the EU’s single market for goods.

Mr Šefčovič explained that the EU would offer to remove 80% of checks on supermarket goods entering Northern Ireland from Britain.

Mr Šefčovič will hold talks with Brexit minister Lord Frost on Friday, with the UK government saying it wishes for ‘intensive’ talks, however it seems unlikely that any agreement will be reached swiftly if at all.

In a speech on Tuesday in which he outlined the UK’s approach to renegotiations, Lord Frost reaffirmed his comments made to the House of Lords in September, in which he said that it would be a “significant mistake” to assume the UK would not trigger Article 16 – the part of the Northern Ireland Protocol which permits elements of the deal being temporarily suspended if they are evidenced to be causing “serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties that are liable to persist, or to diversion of trade.”

He argued that the UK and the EU “would have a chance to move forward to a new, and better, equilibrium,” he explained, if the bloc would accept that the European Court of Justice must be removed from its oversight role, something EU officials have not offered.

Šefčovič said on Wednesday: “It’s very clear that we cannot have access to the single market without the supervision of the ECJ. But I think that we should really put aside this business of the red lines, the business of deadlines, real or artificial, and we should really focus on what we hear from the stakeholders and the people in Northern Ireland, they want us to solve the practical issues.”