Simon Coveney has rejected suggestions from the UK that they could make a Brexit side deal.
The Tánaiste has come out strongly against suggestions from the British Government that a separate trade deal with the UK, separate from the European Union, is a possible runner.
He added that Ireland is currently friendless in Downing Street, saying that “we don’t have a partner in the UK Government” at the moment.
And he claimed that the UK had "abandoned" the commitments agreed after negotiations in November 2017.
He spoke to Miriam O’Callaghan on the Seán O’Rourke Show on RTE Radio One before he headed off today.
He said: “Let me be clear, we are not in the business of a no-deal deal with the UK.
“First of all, we can’t do that bilaterally between the UK and the EU collectively on contingency.”
In a testy interview, Mr Coveney said that the Irish Government is still standing by the agreements of November 2017 and after, which is where the backstop was born.
He continued: “What we are not going to do is to ignore the commitments the British Government has made over the past two and a half years, commitments that they have put in writing, to drop all of those commitments and to now say, ‘well, look, that’s too difficult to get through our parliament and so now we just want to do a side deal on a managed no-deal.’
“That isn’t the way this is going to work.”
“We are not in the business of the UK effectively moving away from commitments they have already made to Ireland and the EU to protect the Good Friday Agreement, to protect the all-island economy, which is the commitment they have made, and to replace that with some sort of makeshift deal in the weeks before a no-deal."
Mr Coveney was speaking following a four hour meeting with the UK Northern Ireland Secretary, Julian Smith on Tuesday night, where he laid out the Government’s position on the backstop.
Ireland, along with all our EU colleagues, are vehemently opposed to any renegotiation of the Brexit deal that would see the backstop scrapped.
This puts us at loggerheads with the new British administration under Prime Minister Boris Johnson, as he is insisting it has to go.
Mr Johnson will be in Berlin tonight meeting German Chancellor Angela Merkel for the first time as the new British Prime Minister, and he is in Paris on Thursday for a similar first-time meeting as PM with French President Emanuel Macron.
Mr Coveney is on his own whistle-stop tour of European capitals this week as he meets EU leaders to copperfasten their support for the backstop.
