(Bloomberg) -- The U.K. should present new text to the European Union to break a potential logjam in Brexit talks, Democratic Unionist Party leader Arlene Foster said.
In a deal agreed in December, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May guaranteed no hard border will re-emerge on the island of Ireland after Brexit, with Northern Ireland playing by the same rules as those in the south if all else fails. At the same time, May gave an assurance that no barriers between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K. will come into play. That second promise was left out of the European Union's draft withdrawal text, published last week, prompting outrage in the U.K.
The current draft “has omissions and overreaches,” Foster told reporters in Brussels on Tuesday after meeting with Michel Barnier, the EU's chief Brexit negotiator. “There will be a need to negotiate.”
The treaty needs to include an explicit guarantee that no border will be placed in the Irish Sea, Foster has indicated. While May dismissed the EU text as unacceptable, Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond told lawmakers on Monday there were no plans to present an alternative draft treaty before a summit later this month.
Discussions with the U.K. government are continuing, Foster said.
The EU and U.K. may still agree a Brexit transition deal by the end of March, Irish Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe said on Monday.
“I believe it is possible that such an agreement will be reached,” Donohoe said in a Bloomberg TV interview in London Monday. “What continues to be critical for Ireland is that the guarantees that we need regarding how a hard border be avoided, that those guarantees be maintained.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Dara Doyle in Dublin at ddoyle1@bloomberg.net, Ian Wishart in Brussels at iwishart@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Vidya Root at vroot@bloomberg.net, Emma Ross-Thomas
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