exclusive ‘Relations between us are in a bad place’ – Simon Coveney says Liz Truss is making no effort on Northern Ireland

Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney. Picture by Niall Carson

Hugh O'Connell

June 12 2022 02:30 AM

Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney has accused British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss of making “no effort” to resolve the Northern Ireland P rotocol row and suggested she may be more focused on trying to succeed Boris Johnson as p rime m inister.

In some of his most critical remarks to date, Mr Coveney said the British government “isn't listening to anybody except themselves” and had made no attempt to seek a compromise in the long-running row over post-Brexit trading arrangements for the North since the last formal negotiations with the EU in February.

In a thinly veiled dig at Ms Truss, he told the Sunday Independent that the protocol row should not be used “within the Conservative Party to generate support for potential leadership” because Ireland “is the collateral damage to that political gamesmanship”.

He was speaking after a week in which Mr Johnson survived a motion of no confidence from his own party but was left badly damaged after 148 of his MPs voted against him. Ms Truss is one of the main contenders to replace him and her move to toughen up legislation to disapply parts of the protocol, which Mr Coveney said will “undoubtedly breach international law” and “mark a new low” in Anglo-Irish relations, is viewed in Dublin as an effort to court favour with Eurosceptic Tories.

Mr Johnson reportedly “snapped at” Ms Truss over the toughness of her legislation, which she is due to publish tomorrow, at a cabinet meeting last week. “Liz Truss is trying to do to Boris what he did to Theresa May,” an Irish government source said last night.

Relations between Mr Coveney and Ms Truss are understood to be strained at present. After a meeting in Turin last month, Mr Coveney posted a picture with his British counterpart on Twitter and stated tersely: “I made clear Ireland’s opposition to the UK breaching international law. The UK needs to get back to talks with the EU.”

Speaking to this newspaper yesterday, Mr Coveney said he did not know if Ms Truss was positioning herself to try and replace Mr Johnson, but added: “People can judge for themselves. The division and tensions within the British government, the leadership challenge, which was closer than expected.

“In some ways it has reinforced the concerns we have that the positioning around the protocol is more about the leadership of the Conservative Party and who is prime minister than it is an effort to actually solve problems in Northern Ireland linked to the disruption of Brexit, which is of course what the protocol is designed to do.”

Mr Coveney said relations were “in a bad place” at present. “It seems to us, looking from Dublin, that their only consideration is around leadership ambition and leadership survival within the Conservative Party,” he said.

He said he would appeal directly to Ms Truss during talks in the coming days to send a signal that the British government is willing to compromise.

“What I am calling for is if the prime minister wants what he says he wants, well then he has got to give a signal to back up that language,” he said.

“All we're getting is signals that they want the opposite, which is unilateral action rather than a negotiation, and that is driven by internal party deliberations and others positioning themselves for that position, appealing to hardline thinking in the party in an effort to maintain enough support.

“That may be the debate in the Conservative Party but the impact it's having on Northern Ireland and Britain's reputation internationally with EU member states is causing an awful lot of division and angst at a time when the opposite should be the focus.”

He said there had been no formal negotiations between Ms Truss and European Commission vice-president Maros Sefcovic since February 11.

“Anyone who is credibly saying that the British government has been trying to find compromises needs to understand that there has been no effort for 120 days to seek compromise, to negotiate a negotiated solution, despite the EU offering multiple compromises since last October,” he said.

Mr Coveney said he believed the EU could facilitate a request from unionism and businesses in the North to treat goods from the UK that are staying in the North differently from those that could move south into the EU’s single market. But he claimed that every time the EU moves towards solving a problem, the government in London has presented a new issue. “Whether it's a refusal to implement what has been agreed in terms of VAT, whether it's around state aid rules, the role of the ECJ, the British government keeps asking for things that they know the EU can’t deliver,” he said.

“So as a result they have formed the view across EU capitals that the British government doesn't want a negotiation.”