Brexit Trade Deadline ‘Very Demanding,’ Irish Finance Chief Says

LONDON (Capital Markets in Africa) – The European Union’s time frame to complete a post-Brexit trade deal with the U.K. will be “very demanding” as officials race to complete a complicated set of negotiations at an unprecedented pace, according to Irish Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson will have only 11 months to negotiate a trade deal with the EU’s 27 remaining members even if an agreement to exit to the bloc goes through the British parliament at the end of January. A rapidly negotiated trade deal will be a lifeline across the Irish Sea.

“It’s a very demanding deadline to have such difficult and complex work done by then,” Donohoe said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in Berlin on Tuesday. “But of course the European Commission and the European Union will be ambitious, and we will look to get the work in the negotiation completed as soon as possible.”

The Irish economy stands to sustain the most damage among EU member states in the event of a disorderly Brexit, though the risk of having no deal has receded amid speculation Johnson will able to push his deal through after the Dec. 12 election.

But after the deal is done, an even bigger task lies ahead: securing a free-trade agreement with the EU before a transition period runs out at the end of 2020. Previous deals have taken years to complete. An EU accord with South American nations in the Mercosur group took 20 years to negotiate.

Since the EU will be negotiating for 27 nations, any deal with has to take into account competing interests ranging from Spanish access to U.K. fishing waters and France’s focus on dairy-export markets. EU states including Ireland have also demanded the future alignment of British regulatory standards.

Donohoe played down any prospect that Brexit could redraw the century-old map of Ireland by bringing about a referendum to unite the Republic of Ireland and U.K.’s Northern Ireland — a prospect contained in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that largely ended the conflict in the north.

“We’re many, many phases way from something like that happening,” Donohoe said. “The view of the Irish government is that the timing is not right for a poll like that, that in fact, it would be very counterproductive.”

Source: Bloomberg Business News