Transition extension - translation

As Irish Deputy Teasack Coveney’s statement was issued to the press, we provide a translation from the gaelic.

COVENEY
Covid-19 has made what is already a very, very difficult timeline to get agreement virtually impossible. Given the added complications of Covid-19 it surely makes sense to seek a bit more time to navigate our way through these very difficult waters in the months ahead so that we can get a good outcome for the UK and EU. I think anybody looking at this from the outside could only conclude it makes sense to look for more time but the British Government has decided that’s not what they want and they have made that very clear both publicly and privately. I wouldn’t be raising expectations around the British Government agreeing to seeking more time. If we’re going to have any chance of persuading them to take more time then we need to be careful about how we do that because demanding it from them … almost as a concession to the EU, is certainly not the way to do it.

TRANSLATION
We’re buggered. Our demands for their fishing waters, subservience of British law to the ECJ and a ball and chain on their trade options are just unrealistic – they won’t accept them. Even our efforts to weaponise the Northern Irish border by demanding an office for the EU Gauleiter in Belfast has been rejected. We’re not going to get an EU-weighted deal.

Anyone looking from the outside can see we’re on the back foot and Germany will force through a trade deal anyway because her industrial sector demands it. And we need the City of London’s services now more than ever – whatever Covid recesssion financial deal the ECB and Brussels stitch up, we will depend on London to carry it out.

Begging the British government to give us a one or two year extension really isn’t a good look. And they wouldn’t even think about it – right now they can hide whatever minor economic ding will be caused by a third-country trade deal in December by the Covid fall-out, which will be ten times worse.

The Teasack needs to get ready to bite the pillow and ask the UK for a bail-out at the end of the year.