David Davis Source: Kirsty O'Connor/PA Images

THE SUGGESTION BY Britain’s Brexit secretary that a ‘change in government’ and the ‘strong influence’ of Sinn Féin have hampered exit negotiations has been broadly panned this morning.

Speaking at conference in London yesterday, David Davis said that he had “not anticipated” the “tough” approach to negotiations adopted by Leo Varadkar, according to a report in the Times Ireland Edition.

“We had a change of government, south of the border, and with a quite a strong influence from Sinn Féin, and that had an impact in terms of the approach,” he said.

When this train of thought was queried by a member of the audience (the Irish government hasn’t changed custodians in seven years) Davis replied: “Well you had a change of leader or a change in taoiseach.” “They’ve (Sinn Féin) been playing a strong political role which they haven’t done historically, that I hadn’t foreseen.”

Davis’s comments echo those often made in hardcore pro-Brexit circles in the UK – that is, that a strong Republican influence has been brought to bear on negotiations from the Irish side. However, such thoughts are rarely expressed via the British cabinet.

The statement has been greeted with derision this morning.

‘Wildly inaccurate’

“The suggestion that electoral issues in Ireland impact ongoing negotiations is wildly inaccurate,” Fine Gael’s spokesman on EU affairs Senator Neale Richmond said.

Anyone who knows Fine Gael and Sinn Féin knows they don’t compete for the same vote, and have wildly different ideologies.

He added that he would not expect such claims (“a very common line from the Brexit wing of the Conservative party”) to be made by a member of the Cabinet.

“I wouldn’t have expected it from David Davis,” he said.

It shows that the average British MP doesn’t understand the nuances of the peace process. It’s very disappointing, completely inaccurate, and certainly not happening.

Meanwhile, UK Labour’s Owen Smith, formerly the shadow secretary for Northern Ireland, dismissed Davis’s words as “complete rubbish”: