EU Trade Commissioner Hogan Sparks Irish Election Row Over Brexit Remarks

(Bloomberg) -- Ireland’s main opposition party leader accused European Union Trade Commissioner Phil Hogan of intervening ahead of the Feb. 8 general election, telling him to “stay out” of domestic politics.

After Hogan, who has roots in Prime Minister Leo Varadkar’s Fine Gael party, warned the toughest part of Brexit talks lay ahead, Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin said he had made a “partisan intervention.” Varadkar has placed Brexit at the center of his election campaign, urging voters not to “change the team” before trade talks between the U.K. and the bloc.

“Phil Hogan should stay out of domestic Irish politics for the next week,” Martin told reporters in Dublin Thursday.

Martin was responding to comments Hogan made in an RTE interview on Thursday, in which he highlighted what could have happened if negotiating the Brexit withdrawal agreement last year had “had gone wrong.”

“You can consider in the context of a general election what this would have meant for manifestos in terms of income, in terms of wages, in terms of jobs, the possible economic rupture in terms of a crash out Brexit.” Hogan, a former Fine Gael government minister, said. “We’re starting the most difficult part of the negotiations.”

Martin described those comments as “an election creation designed to try to frighten people into voting in a certain direction.”

Voters appear more concerned with a housing shortage and a struggling health care system than Brexit. Martin’s Fianna Fail lead Fine Gael in every opinion poll published since the election was called earlier this month.

To contact the reporter on this story: Peter Flanagan in Dublin at pflanagan23@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Ambereen Choudhury at achoudhury@bloomberg.net, Dara Doyle

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