Relations with the EU “will be a bit bumpy for a time”, the UK’s Brexit negotiator Lord David Frost has told MPs, after he and other UK officials appeared to raise the prospect of walking away from the Northern Ireland Protocol unless Brussels relents from what he called its “purist” approach to maintaining the customs border in the Irish Sea.
After a senior ally of Boris Johnson was reported as proclaiming the protocol to be “dead in the water”, Taoiseach Michael Martin said that in a meeting with Mr Johnson at Chequers on Friday, Dublin had been “very clear that this is an international agreement, commitments have been made and it needs to be worked”.
Meanwhile, the BBC has obtained a copy of the protocol “roadmap” shared by the UK with the EU, which the broadcaster said revealed where contentions lay on issues such as food products, medicines, and access to databases, in addition to a British proposal to phase in new Irish Sea border checks on food products in four stages from October.
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