Brexit win follows rugby success

Twickenham was not the only venue for winning moves by Irish players over the weekend.

The Government and its officials involved around Brexit secured a win after British prime minister Theresa May conceded the so-called backstop would be included in the text of the draft withdrawal agreement.

The breakthrough provides the basis for our main story today and essentially commits Britain to retain an open Border between North and South in the absence of an alternative agreement.

The other major aspect of the withdrawal agreement is that the transition period has been extended to 21 months, which will mean Britain will stay subject to EU rules on trade, customs and freedom of movement until then.

Britain commits to talks on open border fallback plan

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Brexit: UK agrees to ‘backstop’ solution for Border in treaty text

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Brexit transition agreement paves way for new phase of talks

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Britain will continue to be subject to the EU fisheries agreement during that period, an agreement that has raised the ire of Scottish fishermen.

As Patrick Smyth and Simon Carswell report: “Following a frantic round of talks in recent days, the EU and UK agreed to the inclusion of a new text in the draft withdrawal agreement that the backstop should apply ‘unless and until another solution is found’.”

The backstop is the third of three alternative scenarios on the Border sketched out in the December agreement.

The first envisaged a comprehensive trade and customs agreement between Britain and Ireland; and the second proposed including the use of advanced technology to overcome a hard border.

Britain is not thrilled with the prospect, and in a letter to EU Council president Donald Tusk, Ms May insisted “more work” was need on certain commitments and expressed confidence an alternative arrangement with Ireland could be brokered.

Tanaiste Simon Coveney said the Government would “enthusiastically” support efforts for an EU-UK trade deal that is “comprehensive enough” to avoid a hard border.

Surprisingly, the DUP has not been jumping up and down. The party again reiterated its stance that there be no internal border in the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and Britain.

There is the ever-present lurking suspicion - and this won’t become evident until final negotiations - that the British understanding of what “backstop” means is markedly different than the view of the EU and Ireland.

Proclaim in haste

Politics in the past few days has seen a lot of hasty, spur-of-the-moment declarations that have led to repentance at leisure.

At the mildest end of the scale was the momentary embarrassment of Shane Ross who, in a tweet, mistook which of the Kearney rugby-playing brothers he was photographed with.

Most have involved social media but - surprise, surprise - the gaffes included one by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar that was made in one of his less-preferred platforms of communications - actually talking to a human being.

Varadkar’s over-reach on his influence in a planning decision on Doonbeg, made during his White House visit, made him a bit of a Loon Mor for several days as he backpedalled.

Sinn Fein has become something of a specialist in this area in recent months. In January, one of its MPs, Barry McElduff, posted a completely inappropriate video on his Facebook page that showed him walking around the place with a loaf of Kingsmill bread atop his head.

It was posted on the anniversary of the 1976 Kingsmill massacre that saw 10 Protestant workmen murdered by the IRA.

Sinn Fein suspended McElduff for three months - he subsequently resigned his Westminster seat.

Only two months later, the party is caught up in another social media controversy. Over the weekend, a spoof account @rnerrionstreet slurred a murdered Portlaoise prison officer, Brian Stack, by describing him as a sadist.

Its Dublin-based senator Maire Devine retweeted the tweet and then compounded the insult by engaging in a Twitter exchange with Austin Stack, the son of the murdered prison officer.

In the end, Sinn Fein moved quickly. Devine was suspended for three months with Mary Lou McDonald using very direct language such as “zero tolerance” and “catastrophic error”.

However, the relatively light sanction is sure to be targeted by other parties in the Dáil today. Already Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are claiming a culture in Sinn Féin of making light of, or being apologists for, atrocities that occurred during the Troubles.

IRA members carried out the killing in 1983, but it took well over two decades for the IRA to admit it.

The kind of moral equivalence toward such an attack on an officer of an independent republic was illustrated by Kerry TD Martin Ferris’s thin-lipped reference to him as “vindictive” in his 2005 autobiography.

For his alleged tough attitude toward IRA prisoners (none of whom ever died at the hands of the Irish prison service) Ferris’s colleagues in the IRA decided he did not deserve to live.