Nancy Pelosi has promised to veto any post-Brexit US/UK trade deal if the Northern peace process is threatened.
The big beast US Congresswoman has thrown her weight behind Ireland in the latest Brexit developments following Boris Johnson’s rise to British Prime Minister.
Ms Pelosi is Speaker of the House of Representatives in the US Congress and has the power to block policy coming from Donald Trump’s White House.
In his first days in power, Mr Johnson has pledged again to turn his back on the EU, ditch the backstop and exit the EU at Halloween with no deal.
After this, he said he plans to negotiate a massive new trade deal with the US to make up for some of the losses a standoff with the EU would bring.
Donald Trump has said he is keen on this, but Ms Pelosi has now thrown a spanner in the works for the US President.
She told the Irish Times in Washington yesterday that she will block a trade deal outside of the already agreed Withdrawal Agreement if it threatens to destabilise the Good Friday Agreement and peace in the North.
She said: “We made it clear in our conversations with senior members of the Conservative Party earlier this year that there should be no return to a hard border on the island.
"That position has not changed. Any trade deal between the US and Great Britain would have to be cognisant of that.”
Ms Pelosi became one of a very select number of US politicians, such as presidents John F Kennedy and Bill Clinton, to address a joint sitting of the Houses of the Oireachtas earlier this year.
She declared on the day that she is “a friend of Ireland.”
