LONDON: British Prime Minister Theresa May is set to hold talks with Irish leader Leo Varadkar as she tries to break the deadlock over the Irish border backstop.
The prime minister has flown to Dublin to resolve a dispute over the mechanism after spending Thursday in talks in Brussels.
The backstop – a customs plan to avoid a “hard” border between Ireland and Northern Ireland if a Brexit deal is not reached – remains the main stumbling block in Mrs May’s plan to take the UK out of the European Union, Sky News reported.
Meanwhile, Attorney General Geoffrey Cox will meet with his Irish counterpart Seamus Woulfe.
He has been working within Whitehall to either provide a time limit on the backstop or give the UK way to ditch the backstop unilaterally if it needs to.
The plans have been met with scepticism in Dublin, which says the backstop cannot be time-limited if it is to provide an “insurance policy” against the return of a hard border on the island of Ireland.
However, the prime minister has warned she needs legally-binding assurances that Britain will not be tied to EU rules indefinitely through the backstop.
