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By Alistair Smout and Tatiana Jancarikova
LONDON / BRATISLAVA (Reuters) – Britain and the European Union said on Tuesday that the issue of relations between the United Kingdom and the United Kingdom has not been finalized because of differences over Irish border. Can reach an agreement.
"We are not yet 100%," said Michel Barnier, chief negotiator of the European Union, during a press conference. "What's missing, it's a solution to the problem of Ireland."
Britain and the EU want to keep the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, members of the EU, open after Brexit, which is considered crucial for the Friday's Holy Peace Agreement signed in 1998, which ended decades of bloody carnage in Northern Ireland.
While final agreements on the border must be agreed in subsequent trade negotiations, a security agreement in case of failure of these negotiations turns out to be tricky. Britain's desire to break out of the customs union is difficult to reconcile with preserving the integrity of the EU's single market.
Barnier said that the EU was working to improve its offer for the so – called "backstop" or emergency fix to keep the Irish border open regardless of the consequences of Brexit, but that this should be achievable.
London wants the backstop to be temporary rather than permanent, while the EU opposes any suggestion that it might expire. Barnier said the backstop can have no end date.
He warned that without an agreement preventing a hard border in Ireland, Britain will leave the EU in less than five months without a transition period.
BREXIT WITHOUT TREATMENT?
May told his cabinet of senior ministers that there was still work to be done on Irish support and that even though the withdrawal agreement was 95% concluded, Northern Ireland was by far the main problem outstanding.
It is not clear whether an agreement can be reached in time to hold an emergency summit of leaders in November in order to sign it. May told ministers that the goal of reaching an agreement "would not be achieved at all costs".
Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said he was open to creative language and creative solutions, but reiterated Ireland's view that the Border Protection Clause in an agreement on Brexit can not have an expiry date nor unilateral exit clause.
The quarrel around the question of whether there would be an agreement to leave the EU from here to Brexit on March 29 came while a poll suggested that the British would prefer to stay after all.
Voters would now be 54% to 46%, the largest independent survey conducted since the vote on Brexit.
May has repeatedly ruled out the resumption of the referendum, saying his job was to vote the 2016 vote to leave the bloc, even as his plan drew criticism from both sides of the Brexit division.
It must unite its government, its parties and its national allies around a Brexit plan also acceptable to the EU.
Sterling fell after a senior member of the North Irish party, who backed May's government, said the UK was at risk of leaving the European Union without an agreement.
"It looks like we can not come to an agreement," Jeffrey Donaldson, one of the 10 legislators of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), said on Twitter, whose support for May must put any deal in the UK Parliament.
But the pound rebounded sharply after a BBC reporter asked Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab after a cabinet meeting that he had been up or down and he replied, "Bravo. "
The pound was up 0.3% against the dollar and Raab's comment pushed the euro to its lowest level in five months versus the pound.
(Report by Alistair Smout, William James and Andy Bruce in London, Amanda Ferguson in Belfast and Padraic Halpin in Dublin, Tatiana Jancarikova in Bratislava and Jan Strupczewski, Alastair Macdonald and Gabriela Baczynska in Brussels Edited by Andrew MacAskill, Janet Lawrence, Guy Faulconbridge )
