Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

For anyone who has been following the detail of what has been happening, suggesting that this is the best strategy for which the UK could have hoped does not make sense. What we have got is consistently conflicting messages from different British Government Ministers. This has made it very difficult to progress anything, including for Britain. No country needs an agreement before October more than Britain does. Ireland is second in line. The damage to the British economy of a crash-out, no-deal Brexit would be catastrophic. The fallout from that would also be very damaging for Ireland, which is why I do not believe we will have a no-deal Brexit. That is why the focus has to be where it should be which is in the negotiating room in Brussels between senior British negotiators and the Barnier task force to tease through the complexity of the issues they face. The British negotiating team needs direction from its political system to be able to do that. We will hopefully see that after the next important meeting in the UK, which will happen at Chequers on Friday, 6 July.

We have done an enormous amount of work on contingency. We deliberately have not been speaking about it publicly because we do not believe it advances some of the negotiating positions we want to maintain. We certainly do not want to create some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that contingency can solve the issues when it will be the negotiations, and the outcome thereof, that will solve them.

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