21:03

Fresh and urgent moves to salvage the Brexit negotiations were underway on Wednesday night after Theresa May told the Irish prime minister she will come back with fresh text on the Irish border “tonight or tomorrow”.

The Taoiseach Leo Varadkar revealed that there was “room to manoeuvre” the deal into the right position before the European council summit next week.

Ireland’s taoiseach, Leo Varadkar and Mark Rutte, prime minister of the Netherlands, hold a news conference in Dublin. Photograph: Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters

He told reporters in Dublin at a press conference with the Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte:

Having consulted with people in London [May] wants to come back to us with text tonight and tomorrow. And I expect to move forward as well – I want us to move forward if it’s possible next week. I explained my position to her, she explained her position to me. It was a very good call. We were willing to look at any proposals the UK have. While we were willing to consider them, we believe the one we had on Monday would work for Ireland and had to be assured that any new language would be consistent with that.

Varadkar said he “agreed to look at any text with a positive and open” attitude and opened the possibility of a truce with the Democratic Unionist Party with what appeared to be a soft interpretation of what “regulatory alignment” might mean between Northern Ireland and Ireland post Brexit.



He said that regulatory alignment, which is one of three options for a post Brexit border arrangement in the Brussels deal, did not apply to “everything”, merely areas of “north south” activity.

He said that there was already regulatory divergence on the island – for instance fireworks are legal in Northern Ireland but not in the republic.

Rutte said the EU was “working very hard” to move forward, but it could not without a deal on the Irish border.

He said: