17:17

The DUP leader Arlene Foster has said the text of the Irish border deal came as a “big shock” when she saw it yesterday.

In an interview with RTE News about to be broadcast she said her party only saw the text late yesterday morning as British and Irish officials were tying up loose ends ahead of Theresa May’s lunch meeting with Jean Claude Juncker.

“Once we saw the text, we knew it was not going to be acceptable,” she told RTE’s Northern Ireland correspondent Tommy Gorman.

She told him the DUP had been asking for the text for five weeks.

She also said she had a very open conversation with May after the DUP press conference in which she said they could sign not up to anything that would mean a border in the Irish sea.

She told her “it could have been dealt with differently”.

Foster said she had been told by British negotiators that the Irish government did not want her to see the text ahead of yesterday’s crunch meeting in Brussels.

“We are told that the Irish government prevented it coming to us.

Gorman asked: “Who told you that?”

She replied: “The British negotiating team”.

UPDATE: Here is more from the interview.

Foster indicated she wanted the detailed negotiations relating to the future governance of the Irish border removed from the negotiating document and revealed that there had been “no contact” with Dublin over the text.

She also attacked the “aggressive” campaign by the Irish government on Brexit and said unionists were spooked after the tanaiste Simon Coveney told a Dail committee that one of his aspirations was united Ireland in his political lifetime.

This thesis was rejected by the deputy prime minister Coveney last Friday when he said it was difficult not to get drawn into identity politics when discussing northern Ireland but it was not an “green vs orange” issue.

“I think the Irish government have insisted on a lot of detail in relation to the border – they don’t need to have detail to move on to phase two, so they can talk about trade, they have listened to the UK government and indeed ourselves around the fact we don’t want a hard border,” Foster told RTE. She went on: