No credible Brexit backstop alternatives exist, Ireland insists

Irish deputy Prime Minister Simon Coveney said the UK government was engaged in "wishful thinking" if it planned to try and renegotiate over the backstop part of the Brexit withdrawal agreement.

Coveney was speaking a day after Theresa May's government won a thin majority on Tuesday to seek an alternative to the Irish backstop.

He told an audience in Dublin that all of the backstop alternatives had been tested and found "do not stand up to scrutiny". yet May was still advocating again for these same options.

Comparing the UK’s negotiation methods to someone saying they will jump out of the window if they don’t get what they want, Coveney said Ireland "cannot approach this negotiation on the basis of threats".

He pointed out that ahead of the House of Commons vote the night before, May had recommended that her party vote against the deal that she herself had spent all of last year negotiating.

“We have a deal, the British government was part of that," Coveney said. "It’s an extraordinary situation that when a prime minister and a government negotiates a deal and then goes back and during the ratification process votes against their own deal, which is what happened yesterday, and now wants to go back to their negotiating partner and change everything.”

Coveney argued that Ireland helped May sway Brussels over a series of issues to benefit the UK because the backstop had been preapproved.

“Ireland helped to lobby to change it [the original backstop]. Michel Barnier helped. She signed up for it, for her government to back it.

“The UK wants it both ways, no red lines and no backstop. We have a guarantee and we intend holding the British government to those guarantees. We had an agreement here. The prime minister signed up to it.”

“We have a negotiated outcome that is now not being followed through on. If you look at her interviews in recent weeks, she [May] talks about saying we can’t sit around and says we don’t want border infrastructure, we have to have legal and practical ways of doing that and that is why she defends the backstop.”

He also claimed that May said the backstop was necessary to reassure people in Northern Ireland “so surely the responsible thing for Irish government to do is to hold the British government to its word.”

On the backstop alternatives he said: “We have been through all of these things. We have tested them and we have found that they do not stand up to scrutiny, and now we have a British prime minister advocating again for the same things that were tested,” Coveney said.