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 headed to Dublin for his first official visit to Ireland.
The tánaiste said the EU wanted 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 on Saturday 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.
Martin said 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. But he added that 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.”
The Northern Ireland secretary, Hilary Benn, told the British-Irish Association conference in Oxford on Saturday that Labour was committed to implementing the Brexit deal in full in Northern Ireland in order to get a veterinary deal with the EU to reduce or potentially remove barriers to exports and imports of farm products.
“Let me be absolutely clear: this Labour government’s commitment to the Good Friday agreement, in letter and in spirit, is absolute. Our support for the European convention on human rights, which underpins the agreement, is unwavering,” he said.
“We will implement the Windsor framework [the Northern Ireland trading arrangements] with pragmatic good faith, not least because we need to do so in order to be able to negotiate a veterinary agreement with the European Union, but also in order to protect the open border on the island of Ireland.”
Starmer’s trip to Ireland marks a stepping up of his drive to reset relations with the country, with which the UK has a trading relationship worth more than £85bn a year. It will be the first visit by a British PM to the Republic of Ireland in five years.
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 Nations League football match in Dublin late on Saturday afternoon, were in “lockstep” about the future.
Martin, speaking to reporters at the British-Irish Association conference 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.”