Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney has said he does not expect the UK to trigger Article 16 of the Northern Ireland protocol, despite threats to do so by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
The protocol is a post-Brexit trade arrangement, which was agreed by the UK and the EU in order to avoid the reintroduction of a hard border on the island of Ireland.
Triggering Article 16 of the agreement allows either side to unilaterally seek to dispense with some of the terms if they are proving unexpectedly harmful.
Neither side can scrap the protocol via these safeguard measures.
Mr Johnson said on Friday it was possible the British government would trigger Article 16 if the EU did not make appropriate concessions on trading restrictions on Northern Ireland.
“We hope that we can fix this thing. This is not a problem that we wanted, I have got to stress that. I can’t emphasise that more,” Mr Johnson told BBC Northern Ireland on Friday.
“The protocol could in principle work . . . It has got enough leeway in the language for it to be applied in a common sense way without creating too many checks down the Irish Sea.”
But he warned it will come down to “fixing it or ditching it”.
“What I am saying to you is I want to see a real negotiation. I want to see the EU come to the table with some serious proposals to fix it.”
Brussels is due to respond in full shortly to a “command paper” put forward by London in July calling for fundamental changes to the protocol. The European Commission has rejected a total renegotiation.
The July proposals also once again raised the prospect of triggering Article 16 of the agreement, which allows either side to unilaterally seek to dispense with some of the terms if they are proving unexpectedly harmful.
Triggering Article 16 would mark a major escalation of the dispute and could lead to significant retaliatory measures.
“My understanding is that the British government is not likely to trigger Article 16,” Coveney told RTÉ on Saturday.
“It would be a hugely problematic backward step in relationships between the UK government and the EU institutions at a time actually when we are trying to build trust,” he added. –Reuters
