EU officials are reeling at the resurgence of the idea that technology can solve the Irish border issue

On Monday evening, Michel Barnier will sit down to dinner in Brussels with his third Brexit secretary, Stephen Barclay.

The British cabinet minister will come fresh from meetings with the alternative arrangements working group, a group of Tory MPs from across the party who believe there is something to the idea of the Malthouse compromise, a resurrection of the idea that technology could solve the Irish border issue. UK officials are playing down expectations. The thought of it has EU officials tearing their hair out.

“After two years, we have come full circle,” said one EU diplomat. It had been a two-year hunt for this “unicorn”, said a second.

In the immediate post-referendum confusion in the summer of 2016, Ireland’s then prime minister, Enda Kenny, spoke of a “virtual border” and “ways of dealing with modern technology in terms of checking trade”.

Technical work began in Dublin on automatic licence plate recognition systems and trusted trader schemes. London was on the same wavelength.

“It will cost us a lot of work on technology to maintain border control on goods but without having border posts, but that’s what we intend to do,” the then Brexit secretary, David Davis, told MPs.

But by February 2017, Kenny was exasperated by the lack of ideas from Downing Street, and alarmed by his first sighting of Irish studies on the feasibility of such a fix.

Cameras for licence plate recognition would be a target for dissident groups, leading to the need for policing, and thus extra targets. To fight smuggling, which would be encouraged by the waiving of checks for small traders, customs officers would need to be present. “The administrative and fiscal burden on the traders involved cannot be underestimated,” Ireland’s Office of the Revenue Commissioners said.

“Let me be absolutely clear on one point,” Kenny told a thinktank in Dublin. It was a “vital national interest” to avoid not only the border of the past but also a “new one in the future”. “This is a political matter, not a legal or technical matter,” he said. Irish officials were told to suspend their work.

When the Brexit negotiations finally started in earnest in June 2017, after Theresa May’s disastrous general election result, the EU’s deputy chief negotiator, Sabine Weyand, and the prime minister’s chief Brexit adviser, Olly Robbins, danced around the issue, mapping out where joint membership of the single market was vital to north-south cooperation.

It was a steep learning curve. When May subsequently confirmed that Northern Ireland would require specific solutions for its unique circumstances, Brussels was encouraged that a realistic approach was emerging.

An August 2017 paper from the UK pushed the case for keeping Northern Ireland in the single electricity market for starters – “to keep the lights on” – and nodded at the need for regulatory equivalence for agri-food measures to avoid checks on animals and plants. The basis of the single market aspect of the Irish backstop was already there. A political fix, not a technical one.

There was also the first concerted stab in a second paper at proposing a technological arrangement for customs. One option was a “highly streamlined customs arrangement” comprising trusted trader schemes with licence plate technology and exemptions for small businesses conducting 80% of cross-border trade in Northern Ireland. A second was a “customs partnership” in which the UK would collect duties on the EU’s behalf for goods destined for the bloc.

Alarms bells rang in Dublin. Before they were even presented in the negotiations after the summer break, the ideas were trashed to reporters by EU officials as “magical thinking”. “We hadn’t even had a meeting by then,” a source admitted.

The subsequent formal presentations at the end of August and in September turned into a bloodbath. The infrastructure required was said to pose a threat to peace, the “blind eye” to some traders provided an incentive to smugglers, and the dual tariff system heaped costs on the EU and European businesses.

Looking for a creative solution would not mean suspending the EU’s legal order, Weyand warned. Barnier would tell Davis to go back to the drawing board. Most significantly, there was little pushback from the British, sources on both sides have confirmed.

Today neither EU nor UK officials rule out a technological solution for the border at some point. In order to entice MPs to vote for the withdrawal agreement, it is understood the EU is looking at spelling out how just such a solution might work in the future, and its determination to work on the current problems. But that is not something that anyone can rely on as a definitive solution at the end of the transition period. It is for the future, and the customs union in the backstop stays.

Asked how the UK’s fresh groping for technological fixes is being viewed in Brussels, sources point to Weyand’s recent comments. “The [British] negotiators have not been able to explain them to us and that’s not their fault,” she said. “It’s because they don’t exist.”