Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I read the report last week, or possibly on Monday, and I certainly did not suppress it. The report is from 2015 and was carried out before the referendum even happened. Much has changed since then, not least the commitment from the Government of the United Kingdom that there will no physical infrastructure on the Border, and the negotiating guidelines that we have agreed from the European Union. I can assure Deputy Martin that I did not suppress this report; I did not even know that it existed until last week or early this week. I have since read it and have no difficulty with it being published. There is nothing in it that should be of any surprise to anyone. It is a desktop analysis carried out by the Revenue Commissioners as to what may happen in the event of a hard Brexit, there being a hard border, Britain leaving the customs unions and Ireland being left unable to negotiate with Britain either a unique arrangement for Northern Ireland or a customs union partnership which would essentially replicate the customs union. What the report says should not surprise anyone. If no customs union partnership is agreed with the United Kingdom, if there are no special arrangements for Northern Ireland and if we end up with the hard Brexit that we are all working to avoid then this would produce exactly these results. It would result in enormous cost and enormous bureaucracy for business, along with customs posts, border guards, truck stops and all of the various things that we are working so hard to avoid. This should not come as a surprise to anyone. Nobody should be shocked at this. We have been talking about the consequences of a hard Brexit for years now. I have been to the border between the USA and Canada to see exactly what a hard border would mean. It has been our objective all along to prevent this happening and we have been very resistant to any defeatism from anyone, including the Opposition and its suggestion that a hard border is inevitable and that we should start preparing for it. It is one thing to carry out a desktop analysis as to what may happen in a certain scenario - this has been happening and I have told the Deputy this. It is a totally different thing for people to start preparing for a border that we are going to oppose tooth and nail.

See this speech in context