Dublin will not give up on the Northern Ireland backstop clause in Britain's EU Withdrawal Agreement, Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar has warned.

"To me, no backstop is effectively the same as no deal because what the backstop represents is a legally operable guarantee that we will never see a hard border emerge again," Varadkar told the Irish public broadcaster RTÉ, adding"If we don't have that, that is no deal".

Varadkar also rejected the notion of an expiry date on the backstop clause wh...