Ireland's Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney speaks about Brexit at the "State of the Union 2019" event in Dublin, Ireland January 30, 2019. REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The British parliament is making an unreasonable request of Ireland to replace an already agreed solution to avoid a physical border on the island of Ireland after Brexit with something else, Ireland’s foreign minister said on Monday.

The British parliament decided last week it wanted Prime Minister Theresa May to renegotiate the country’s withdrawal treaty with the European Union to replace the agreement reach on the Irish backstop with “alternative arrangements”.

But Ireland’s Foreign Minister Simon Coveney told reporters in Brussels that so far he has heard of no “alternative arrangements” that would work.

“The problem has been that none of those ideas around alternative arrangements have actually stood up to scrutiny. We certainly haven’t seen any that have,” Coveney said.

“We spent well over a year looking at different ways of providing the guarantee of no physical border infrastructure on the island of Ireland to protect an all Ireland economy which reinforces a peace process. Many hours were involved with coming up with a legally credible and pragmatic solution,” he said.

“I have yet to hear any new thinking that goes beyond what’s already been tested. What Ireland is being asked to do by some in Westminster is to essentially do away with an agreed solution between the UK government and EU negotiators and to replace it with wishful thinking. That is a very unreasonable request to ask the Irish government to be flexible on,” he said.