Ireland’s EU commissioner has said that Theresa May needs to drop her Brexit red line on the customs union to break the impasse on the Irish border question. Phil Hogan said there was deep frustration in Brussels that with just seven months to the deal deadline, the conversations were still “London-London and not London-Brussels”.

He said May had painted herself into a corner by starting her negotiations with so many red lines, and that if the UK did not want to crash out of Europe, it needed to review them. He suggested that May’s opposition to a “backstop” option where Northern Ireland would be in regulatory alignment with the EU contradicted the UK’s position in previous talks.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ireland’s EU commissioner Phil Hogan said Theresa May should agree to customs union. Photograph: Stephanie Lecocq/EPA

“Some of the hysterics we have seen in the last 24 hours in relation to what was being put on the table is a very big surprise to me, because nobody should have been surprised by what was going to be in this document if they were close to the negotiations in December,” he told RTE radio’s Sean O’Rourke show.

He said Theresa May knew what she had to do was to deliver the December deal when she signed it after two high-profile trips to Brussels in December. But he said she had backed herself into a corner by ruling out remaining in the customs union from the outset.

“If you start off in a negotiation with a lot of red lines – no customs union, no single market, no European court of justice – well, then you run out of options, and this is the problem with the UK government in my view,” he said.

Hogan said it was “nonsense” to think the EU was interfering with the constitutional position of Northern Ireland as suggested by Brexiters and the Democratic Unionist party.

He said the British government had signed up to the December deal “on the basis that they know, and all of us know, that the only way you can operationalise the [December] agreement … is for the United Kingdom to change their view and to remove the red line of being part of a customs union”.



His remarks come as both the European council president, Donald Tusk, and the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, hinted that Britain needed to review its red lines to allow negotiations to proceed.



In front of photographers at No 10, Tusk told May he was “not happy” with her red lines, while Barnier said in Brussels that the UK is closing doors on itself “one by one on options”, suggesting the only possible model left would be a free trade agreement along the lines of those with Canada, Japan or South Korea.



Meanwhile, the Labour-led Welsh government warned that a border in the Irish Sea under a hard Brexit would damage Welsh interests. Such a border would be “very problematic” for Wales and damage Welsh ports, Mark Drakeford, Wales’s cabinet secretary for finance, said in an interview.



Drakeford said the Welsh government wanted to avoid “play[ing] up our anxieties in a way that would cause additional difficulties” for Ireland, but would stand up for “material Welsh interests”. He said he feared that Holyhead – the UK’s third busiest port by passenger numbers – Fishguard and Pembroke Dock would lose out if trade stopped flowing freely across the Irish Sea, as a sea border could result in continental and Irish ships avoiding British ports. Drakeford said the answer was for the whole UK to remain in the EU single market and customs union.



He was speaking on a visit to Brussels soon after the European commission unveiled a draft legal text that could see Northern Ireland remain under EU rules on customs and goods, effectively putting the UK-EU border in the Irish Sea.



More Welsh people voted to leave the European Union than to remain, but Drakeford insisted that his preferred option of “ongoing regulatory alignment” was in the interests of leave voters. “People in Wales voted to leave the EU,” he said, “but they did not vote to take leave of their senses, and that means we have to go on making the case with people that it is their economic interests at stake.”