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

It had not. Those can be accessed in each other's countries as though people were citizens of both. It had not been previously agreed and certainly had not been written down in an agreement between the EU and UK in black and white. There are commitments relating to the Good Friday Agreement and to continue funding for INTERREG, which is important for regional development, to retain funding for peace, which is particularly important in Northern Ireland, and also an agreement that there will continue to be a separate strand on Irish issues. That was agreed in December and there is already such a second strand. There was a set of guarantees and commitments relating to the avoidance of a hard border and three options to achieve that are outlined in the December joint report. The first option, the preferred option of the British and Irish Governments, is to avoid a hard border through a new relationship between the European Union and the United Kingdom, within the framework of the EU-UK agreement, which includes all of Ireland and in which we have a new arrangement which is as close as possible to the customs union and Single Market arrangement that exists now. That will be hard to achieve but is absolutely our preferred outcome and is what we are currently working on. The second option is the UK-specific solution. It is up to the UK to come up with those proposals and convince the European Union that they can be done. The third option, which I described at the time as a backstop and the Prime Minister describes as a last resort, is that there are special arrangements for Northern Ireland, where it continues to maintain full regulatory alignment with the European Union, allowing a hard border to be avoided. For reasons that I think should be obvious to everyone in this House, the first option is preferred.

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