Thread by @kevinhorourke

This kind of headline makes a border more, not less likely, since it increases the probability of a No Deal Brexit by encouraging Brexiteers to believe that the backstop is not in fact required
irishtimes.com/news/politics/…

True, we later read
"Taoiseach Leo Varadkar later told the Dáil that if there was a no-deal outcome, the British and Irish governments and the EU “would have to negotiate an agreement on customs and regulations that would mean full alignment so there would be no hard border”.

So he is still correctly arguing that alignment is required to avoid a border. Good. But first, Brexiteers don't do nuance, and they have a great knack for only reading and hearing the things they want to read and hear. They'll just see the headline.

And second, it is all very well saying that the EU and the UK (I'm not sure what the Irish government is doing in that sentence) will "have to" negotiate alignment, i.e. a backstop arrangement. He's right: of course they will have to for a border to be avoided.

But we're discussing a scenario in which HMG has decided it won't accept the backstop. And is prepared to crash out with No Deal because of that. So in the first instance, they will have ruled this out, and a hard border will re-appear, with all the costs and risks that entails.

The Irish government would be wise to come clean about this since otherwise Brexiteers & their friends in the Irish media will start running a campaign saying that the border is back because of the EU (when in fact it will be back because HMG has reneged on promises made 3 times)

The border will return, inevitably, in a No Deal scenario. The real point, and perhaps this is what the government is getting at, is that we don't know how long it will last. The UK will at some stage decide it wants a trade deal with the EU.

At that stage the question of the backstop will re-emerge. And so there is the prospect that any border that emerges will only prove temporary. That is what you have to hope from an Irish perspective.

But that hope is more plausible if Ireland keeps the rest of the EU onside. Getting into spats with the European Commission when it issues statements of the obvious is probably not the right way to achieve that.