Ireland sees agreement on Northern Ireland protocol 'unlikely' due to 'Tory' leadership crisis

MADRID, 19 Oct. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The Irish Foreign Minister, Simon Coveney, has changed his mind and now considers that it is "unlikely" that the United Kingdom and the European Union reach an agreement on the Northern Ireland protocol due to the 'tory' leadership crisis. .

"I think the chances of a big breakthrough between London and Brussels before October 28 are highly unlikely. Not because both sides don't want to make progress, but because there's a lot of other things going on in British politics," he said. The Guardian newspaper.

In this sense, he specified that there is no room to take that "type of step forward" that they expected "weeks ago", especially due to the collapse in the popularity of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Liz Truss, due to her latest political shifts in fiscal matters.

On the other hand, Coveney has expressed during a visit to Belfast that he does not see that the threats of the British minister for Northern Ireland, Chris Heaton-Harris, about calling new elections in mid-December, are a hoax.

"The minister is not lying," he said, adding that they had "a good conversation" on the subject this morning. "I think he was very clear yesterday in the House of Commons and he also consulted with his cabinet colleagues," he said, as reported by the RTÉ network.

Shortly after Truss took office, Coveney himself maintained that the British government was willing to establish an "honest, open and serious" dialogue on the Northern Ireland Protocol included in the Brexit agreements.

After a meeting with Heaton-Harris at Hillsborough Castle, he assured that the messages coming from London were "quite different" from those of recent months, for which they called on the British Government to work with the European Commission to unblock the situation.

The Stormont Assembly has a process ahead of it to recover the institutionality of the Northern Irish autonomous government now with the Republican party Sinn Féin at the helm, after its victory in the elections last May.

The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) refuses to return to the Executive until the dispute over the Northern Ireland Protocol is resolved in its terms, for which the process has been blocked for months after a vote that did not go ahead to nominate the president and Vice President of Stormont.

In this sense, Heaton-Harris threatened on Tuesday, after appearing in the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee of the House of Commons, with an election call if there is no Executive "after midnight on October 28".

Sinn Féin, led by Michelle O'Neill, won 27 of the 90 seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly and is currently the leading political force ahead of the DUP (25) and the Alliance Party (17). . The Ulster Unionists Party has nine seats and the Social Democratic and Labor Party has eight seats.