Professor Colin Harvey:

I have thought long and hard about the legal side of it. If, at the far end of this process, we wanted to pursue legally the things we have been talking about today through a new British-Irish agreement, whoever drafts that legal instrument needs to give much more thought to issues around enforcement and implementation than is currently the case around the Good Friday Agreement. I put it as strongly as that.

I mentioned that in the draft negotiating guidelines, the EU sounded like it was inserting itself into guarantor-type territory. If there is a withdrawal agreement around all of this, and whatever happens about the unique and special status arrangements, we need to give much more thought to not being in the position where we say that one party is in default in relation to the agreement, that they are not respecting the basic and fundamental principles, and we cannot legally do anything about it. Whoever is involved in those conversations, be they lawyers or drafters or whoever, needs to think about the process of how one calls it when another party is in default of an international treaty.