The UK cannot have an “a la carte” reset of the Brexit agreement, Ireland’s deputy prime minister has said just hours before Keir Starmer heads to Dublin for his first official visit to Ireland.
The Tánaiste said that the EU wanted to see an improved EU-UK relationship but that the UK could not “cherrypick”.
Micheál Martin said Brexit had also shown how Anglo-Irish relationships could easily be torpedoed by political decisions. A succession of Irish leaders have described relations during the Conservative government as the worst in more than 50 years.
Starmer will be in Dublin for all-day meetings with the taoiseach, Simon Harris, and a series of business leaders including representatives from Primark, Dawn Meats, the dairy company Ornua and Glen Dimplex, one of Ireland’s most successful exporters known for its oil heater manufacturers.
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Ireland was in favour of a veterinary deal to ease paperwork and checks on its huge exports of cheese, butter and other farm produce to Britain, said Martin. But he added the UK could not just present a list of demands to the EU.
While the EU wants a “good and warm relationship”, he said it was “not à la carte. Europe doesn’t want cherrypicking of any particular issues”, adding: “We would like to have an ease of trading relationships. But it has to be mutually beneficial.”
Starmer’s trip to Ireland marks a stepping up of his drive to reset relations with Ireland the country with which it has a trading relationship worth more than £85bn a year. It follows years of soured relations over the post-Brexit settlement, including the Irish border issue.
Starmer also met with German and French leaders Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron in recent weeks.
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Before the meeting the prime minister said the two countries shared “the strongest of ties” but the relationship had not reached its full potential. “I want to change that,” he said. “We have a clear opportunity to go further and faster to make sure our partnership is fully delivering on behalf of the British and Irish people – driving growth and prosperity in both our countries.”
He said the two men, who will go to the Ireland v England football match in Dublin on Saturday, were in “lockstep” about the future.
Martin, speaking to reporters at the British-Irish Association conference in Oxford on Friday, said a review of the sanitary and phytosanitary rules mandated by the Brexit trade deal, which would reduce red tape and public health certification on exports and imports between the two countries, made “absolute sense” for British businesses.
“Everybody talks about being in favour of reducing red tape and bureaucracy around trade,” he added. “I think there are easy wins here. But it’s not for me to, sort of, be telling the British government what it should aim for, what it should go for. It has to assess what it can do within its political realities.” - The Guardian and Bloomberg