[ad_1]
The Department of Foreign Relations has challenged a claim by a US envoy that Simon Coveney said the European Union could use aviation as a lever on the UK to enforce an Irish Sea border after Brexit.
Mick Mulvaney, the US president’s special envoy for Northern Ireland, said Coveney told him during a private meeting in September that the EU could use commercial aviation as leverage to force the British to adhere to the Brexit deal to avoid a hard border in the country. island of Ireland.
A department spokesman said Coveney and Mulvaney discussed aviation as part of “a broad and extensive discussion” on EU-UK interdependence, but “not as a threat.”
Mulvaney, speaking at a webinar hosted by the Institute of International and European Affairs (IIEA), said he told Coveney that he feared that if the UK’s Internal Market Act went into effect, it could lead to a hard border in Ireland. .
He said he was concerned that the EU could put “tremendous pressure” on the Irish to control the flow of goods crossing the border from outside the EU in Belfast into Dublin.
Mulvaney said the minister told him that there were “far more powerful levers that Europeans could wield under the circumstances than a border across the island of Ireland.”
He said Coveney cited commercial aviation as an example “reaching the British somewhere that is a little closer to home, perhaps with a bigger economic impact.”
Later, Mr. Mulvaney said in the webinar that what he learned from the meeting with Mr. Coveney was that “British Airways still wants to fly from London to the mainland and if the Europeans got really mad they could really make the life of BA very difficult. “
A departmental spokesman said that Coveney and Mulvaney discussed how the bill “had complicated ongoing talks on a new trade agreement” and that Coveney had made it clear that the withdrawal agreement was “legally binding and prevents a hard border at all the circumstances”.
[ad_2]