The former taoiseach said the British were making some ‘deeply destructive proposals’
A banner hangs on a property in a loyalist area of Belfast known as The Village, with the message to EU Vice-President of the European Commission Maros Sefcovic, UK prime minister Boris Johnson, US President Joe Biden and Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney, to choose between the Belfast Agreement or the Northern Ireland Protocol.
“Instead all of the signals are about unilateral action, making demands with no willingness to compromise, and that has hardened the EU response to what they’re seeing coming out of London now. “My message to the British government is a very clear one, which is that if you are genuinely interested in negotiated solutions to these problems, and there are problems in terms of the protocol and its implementation, well then let’s see some evidence as to a willingness to negotiate seriously those solutions through compromise, through flexibility.
“Remember we are at war. There is a war taking place in Ukraine because Russia is breaking a treaty guaranteeing the territorial integrity of Ukraine. And Britain is supporting Ukraine in that And yet at the very same time they are proposing to break a treaty concerning their nearest neighbour Ireland and the European Union which they freely negotiated and indeed which was endorsed in the Conservative party manifesto of 2019 where it was described as a ‘great new deal.
Mr Bruton was speaking as the British government delayed until next week a Bill to unilaterally scrap parts of the Northern Ireland protocol amid a last-minute disagreement over what form it should take and concerns about the position of the Democratic Unionist Party . Speaking to the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Wednesday ,Mr Martin stepped up his criticism of Boris Johnson’s government, telling MEPs that the proposed British legislation would be a “historic low point” which would signal a “disregard for essential principles of laws, which are the foundation of international relations” and would “quite literally, be to the benefit of absolutely no one”.
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