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Brexit Backstop Won’t Be Traded for Vague Promises, Irish Warn

Brexit Backstop Won’t Be Traded for Vague Promises, Irish Warn

(Bloomberg) --

Ireland needs more than promises from the U.K. to compromise in the Brexit stand-off, the nation’s foreign minister warned.

U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson wants the so-called backstop, the fallback mechanism to keep the Irish border invisible after Brexit, stripped from its divorce agreement with the European Union. Johnson says the device risks shackling the U.K. to EU rules indefinitely.

In Paris on Wednesday, Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney challenged the U.K. to table realistic alternatives to the backstop.

“We can’t give up on something that we know works on the back of a promise without any idea as to how it’s going to work,” Coveney told reporters.

Coveney said Northern Ireland’s peace process was “fragile,” and needed to be protected. Earlier, he said that the backstop is “currently” the only viable solution to border issue and even if the EU wanted to reopen the divorce deal, it’s too late to do so ahead of the Oct. 31 deadline for the U.K. to leave.

“Even if we wanted to do that, which we don’t, we can’t do it in six or 10 weeks,” he said.

While the EU is open to exploring alternative arrangements, they must achieve the same objectives as the backstop, he said.

--With assistance from Francois de Beaupuy.

To contact the reporters on this story: Peter Flanagan in Dublin at pflanagan23@bloomberg.net;Caroline Connan in Paris at cconnan@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Caroline Connan at cconnan@bloomberg.net, Dara Doyle

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