Irish Brexit Quarrel Escalates as May Ally Told to Stop Whinging

(Bloomberg) -- The Irish government and a key political ally of U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May traded blows over Brexit, in a sign of rising tensions over the terms of Britain's departure from the European Union.

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar warned Friday that he wouldn't help the U.K. set up border checks between the south and north of Ireland after Brexit. Varadkar ordered officials to scale back work examining technological solutions to minimize disruption along the frontier, according to officials familiar with the matter.

“Just what is going on in Dublin?,” Nigel Dodds, a lawmaker with the Democratic Unionist Party, which is propping up May's government, said in an emailed statement. “The intemperate outburst by Leo Varadkar is just the latest in a series of inconsistent and incoherent statements.”

An ally of Varadkar, Senator Neale Richmond, shot back on Monday, telling the DUP to “stop whinging,” and find solutions to deal with the problems posed by Brexit. Ireland's 310-mile (500-kilometer) border will form the EU's main land boundary with the U.K., and the spat undercuts speculation that the DUP would use its new-found influence to force May to soften her stance on exiting Europe's customs union.

“As the Brexit debate unfolds, it is quite clear that those who championed leaving the EU such as the DUP, and people like David Davis and Boris Johnson have very few detailed suggestions on how to actually solve the problems that Brexit presents for this island,” Richmond said in an emailed statement.

Read more about the importance of the border as a Brexit issue.

The border is one of three key issues that have been identified, along with citizens' rights and money owed by the U.K., that require “sufficient progress” toward a resolution during the Brexit negotiations before the European Union will allow talks to move on to Britain's future relationship with the bloc.

The EU and the U.K. will seek to agree on broad principles on the Irish border dilemma in coming months to prevent the search for a solution holding up the wider Brexit talks, according to four officials familiar with the matter. The DUP's comments underline the scale of the gap between the two sides.

“Varadkar's position is total nonsense,” said Dodds. “There already is an economic border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. For instance, does he not realize that every time you cross the border you need to change currency? Or that each jurisdiction is subject to entirely different taxation and financial regimes?”

To contact the reporter on this story: Peter Flanagan in Dublin at pflanagan23@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael J. Moore at mmoore55@bloomberg.net, Dara Doyle, Richard Bravo