Mr. John Callinan:

If Britain is outside the customs union, trade between the European Union, including Ireland, and Britain will inevitably involve two customs regimes. The question is how we manage and control this and what arrangements can be put in place. That leads to the question of whether we will need border controls between Northern Ireland and this jurisdiction, but the broader issue is whether there will be two customs regimes. We have secured agreement on finding a creative and flexible way of dealing with the matter in order that we will not have the hard border we used to have on the island, with frontier and customs control posts.