The leader of the Democratic Unionist party, Arlene Foster, has warned the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator that he had no right to produce his “utterly unacceptable” solution to avoiding a hard border on the island of Ireland.



Michel Barnier had “overreached” in suggesting that Northern Ireland could effectively stay in the customs union and single market after Brexit, Foster told the commission official during a meeting in Brussels.

The legal text unveiled last week did not fairly reflect a joint report agreed between the European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, and Theresa May last December, it was claimed.

The draft withdrawal treaty was instead said to amount to an unjustified attempt by Brussels to revise the terms of the Good Friday agreement, which has kept the peace since 1998.

Emerging from the meeting with Barnier in the commission’s Berlaymont headquarters, Foster told reporters: “We made the point that the current draft of the EU legal text was not a faithful nor indeed fair translation of the joint report of December ... It has omissions and overreaches in other areas. We will be urging our government to come forward with a different text.”

Of the three options sketched out in the December joint report for avoiding a hard border – including a bespoke technological solution or a trade deal that could emulate the status quo – it is claimed by the EU that only the third solution of alignment between north and south is currently viable, and should be regarded as the “backstop”.

Barnier conceded, however, in a press conference last week that there may need to be checks on goods coming from Northern Ireland at ports and airports in the rest of the UK should the proposal for “full alignment” be implemented.

Quick Guide Why is the Irish border a stumbling block for Brexit? Show Counties and customs Inside the EU, both Ireland and Northern Ireland are part of the single market and customs union so share the same regulations and standards, allowing a soft or invisible border between the two.

Britain’s exit from the EU – taking Northern Ireland with it – risks a return to a hard or policed border. The only way to avoid this post-Brexit is for regulations on both sides to remain more or less the same in key areas including food, animal welfare, medicines and product safety. The 'backstop' in Theresa May's Withdrawal Agreement was intended to address this - stating that if no future trade agreement could be reached between the EU and the UK, then rules and regulations would stay as they are. This has been rejected by Brexit supporters as a 'trap' to keep the UK in the EU's customs union, which would prevent the UK striking its own independent trade deals. There are an estimated 72m road vehicle crossings a year between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and about 14% of those crossings are consignments of goods, some of which may cross the border several times before they reach a consumer. Brexit supporters say this can be managed by doing checks on goods away from the border, but critics say it will be difficult to police this without any physical infrastructure like border posts or cameras, which could raise tensions in the divided communities of Ireland.

Interactive: A typical hour in the life of the Irish border Photograph: Design Pics Inc/Design Pics RF

Foster, whose party’s 10 MPs give the prime minister a working majority in parliament, said she had put in clear terms to Barnier the strength of feeling in her party in opposition to such a development.

She said: “We will not countenance any proposal which would create a new border in the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. Placing a border down the Irish Sea would not just be politically unacceptable but would be economically catastrophic.

“Greater flexibility needs to be shown by those in Brussels on the issue of the border ... The December agreement needs to be translated fully and not some elements of it dismissed in order to fulfil one particular outcome.”

The EU’s draft text had also left out a paragraph in the December joint report in which the UK guaranteed that there would be no border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK as a consequence of Brexit.

Foster said she wanted the entirety of the joint report to be translated into legal text, and she offered her support for the suggestions made in August last year by the UK government for a bespoke solution to the problem.

The UK paper from last summer – dismissed at the time as “magical thinking” in Brussels – had outlined two options to eliminate checks on goods crossing the border: the first would use technology to eliminate physical border checks; the second would make the UK responsible for monitoring the bloc’s external border and collecting customs duties for the EU.

Those proposals should not be flippantly dismissed, Foster said. “Also there is a need to deal with some of the overreach in relation to the EU text,” she added of the draft legal text. “It talks about giving the north-south ministerial council powers. Sorry, the EU does not have the right to go into the Belfast agreement in that fashion.”

Foster appeared to offer support for the prime minister’s suggestions that lessons could be learned from the Canada-US border. She said that the infrastructure on that border largely related to checking the movement of people rather than goods, which moved freely.