The leader of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), Arlene Foster, met with the European Union’s Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier in Brussels on March 6. The two discussed the EU’s plan for the Irish border.
No agreement was reached. Foster said the EU’s plan was “unacceptable”.
“We feel that the current draft EU legal text is not a faithful or fair translation” of a preliminary withdrawal deal reached by Britain and the EU in December, Foster told a news conference in Brussels.
As reported by the Agence France-Presse (AFP), Foster, the former first minister in Northern Ireland’s currently suspended power-sharing government, added that the EU had proposed a document that “we found unacceptable and the government finds unacceptable”.
Foster has called on May to come up with a British version of the draft providing “sensible” and “imaginative” solutions, noting that most of Northern Ireland’s trade is with the rest of the UK.
