Ireland’s prime minister has rejected suggestions that people crossing the Irish border would have to pre-register to avoid personal checks after Brexit.

Speaking from the US, where he is conducting a series of St Patrick’s Day engagements, Leo Varadkar said: “No, it is not a solution that we envisage.”

The taoiseach was responding to questions about a controversial plan reportedly being considered by Downing Street.

Pre-registration for transit would affect more than 34,000 nurses, farmers and business people who commute across the 310-mile (500km) border every day for work, as well as other casual visitors including Irish leisure travellers, in both directions.

It is one of a series of measures in a research paper on smart border technology commissioned by the European parliament which Theresa May has reportedly asked officials to look at. Government sources responded to the reports by saying pre-registration was categorically not a proposal on the table.

The future of the border remains a key issue in Brexit talks with no clear plan on how to avoid customs and sanitary checks. Last week, researchers at Queen’s University in Belfast concluded that technology could not make the border frictionless.

Any registration for travel would be counter to the common travel area deal already agreed by Brexit negotiators, which allows British and Irish nationals to continue to move between Ireland and the UK without passport checks.

Varadkar urged senior cabinet figures such as Boris Johnson, who recently said the checks were an Irish/EU problem and not a British one, to visit the border. “You can read as many briefing documents as you like, sometimes you need to see things with your own eyes,” he said.

David Davis, the Brexit secretary, has made one trip to Northern Ireland since the referendum in September 2016 while neither Johnson nor the Brexit negotiator, Oliver Robbins, has been to the border.

May has been to Northern Ireland twice since 2016 but has not visited the border, in contrast to the EU Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, who has been twice, and the European parliament’s Brexit coordinator, Guy Verhofstadt, who visited in September.



“They would certainly be very welcome to visit the border,” Varadkar said at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. “I think it would be a good idea, I can’t see anything negative in a British cabinet minister viewing the border, seeing what it looks like.”

He added: “They would be very welcome to see it for themselves. And to see that it is invisible.”