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

The text was agreed by the negotiation teams on both sides yesterday morning and was confirmed to me in telephone calls with the EU Commission President, Mr. Juncker, and the European Council President, Mr. Tusk, during the morning as well. It was only during the lunch that we got information that a problem had arisen. It is always the case with these agreements that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed and signatures are on the dotted line. In any event that would not have happened until 14 December, which is Thursday of next week. Even if it had been the case that the deal had been agreed in the way we had envisaged it would be yesterday, it is possible that it would still be falling apart today - we need to be realistic about that.

Nonetheless, the ball is very much in London's court. We are here to work constructively on behalf of the European Union and Ireland with the UK Government to come to an agreement based on the principles that we had agreed to, at least in principle, yesterday.

It is important to talk about the kind of agreement that we believed was in place. First of all, it would be one that defends all parts of the Good Friday Agreement and its successor agreements. It is one that would continue to ensure everyone born in Northern Ireland could continue to be a British and Irish citizen and, therefore, a citizen of the European Union. Thus it would allow people in Northern Ireland, for example, people born in Belfast and Derry, to study in Paris, if they wished, to travel to Athens and to work in Madrid. People born in Sheffield and Leeds are giving up that right by leaving the European Union. It would protect the common travel area between Britain and Ireland, which is about so much more than us being able to travel freely between Britain and Ireland. It comes with a whole set of reciprocal citizens' rights and the fact that British and Irish people can live, work and study as well as access health care, housing, education, welfare and pensions in each other's countries as though we were citizens of both. We had that agreed too. We also agreed that INTERREG and PEACE funding, which are so important for Border areas, would continue through to 2020 and 2021 and be favourably considered for the period thereafter. We agreed a solution that we still believe allows us to keep the Border open to trade between North and South.

This solution is that there would not be a hard border and there would be no physical infrastructure. This would be assured in one of three ways, namely, in the end EU-UK new trade agreement, through bespoke solutions that the British Government would come up with or, if all else failed, the UK assuring that regulatory alignment would be continued between Northern Ireland and the European Union. One of these three ways is also one about which the UK Government and those who support Brexit want to talk. By refusing this agreement, the UK Government has made it impossible to talk about the technical solutions it believes could solve our problem. Having asked us for many months to start engaging in options as to how we can avoid a hard border, it has now decided it does not want to have that conversation simply because we have asked that there be a backstop that assures us that in all circumstances there will not be a border with Northern Ireland.

What is interesting, and it has been picked up on by other speakers, is that the agreement we believed we had yesterday and still believe we have, although obviously it has not been ratified, is one which, within hours, was being identified by people in Scotland, Wales and London as an agreement that they too would like. Even people in England, both on the remain and leave sides, have been saying in the past day that perhaps they would like such an arrangement for all of the United Kingdom. It is a remarkable turn of events in that regard. I believe, and this is the most important thing, that the majority of people in Northern Ireland, if they were asked, would like to have this agreement.

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