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Two days of negotiations between the EU and UK concluded on Friday in Brussels with no sign of the stalemate being broken.
The sticking point remains that the EU stubbornly refuses to budge on its core issues before moving on to talk about future trading arrangements.
It does appear that some progress is being made on the future rights of citizens already resident in the respective areas, but the Irish border and the Brexit bill are proving problematic.
Frustrating progress
Indeed, it is the money question that above all frustrates progress.
Dealing with the issues of the Irish border is intertwined with a future trading relationship, so we could imagine that if the other two issues were solved, the Irish border question could be ruled into a future trading relationship.
Much has been made this week of a leaked Brussels report suggesting that Northern Ireland could remain part of the customs union even if the rest of the UK did not.
This would facilitate free movement of goods on the island of Ireland.
However, that created what would be a politically unacceptable situation of having a de facto border between Northern Ireland and Britain.
It was no surprise that the UK’s lead negotiator, David Davis, was dismissive of this suggestion in the press conference held at the end of the sixth round of negotiations.
The notion of Northern Ireland having an arrangement along these lines has been doing the rounds for some time but it has never had any traction among unionist politicians as it is regarded as a diminution of the union, irrespective of how it would enable continuation of the cross border trade in agricultural produce to continue on present lines.
The focus by mainstream media on the north possibly remaining in the customs union overlooks the other big problem with Brexit.
For farmers south of the border, business with the north is limited to the pig meat sector, where several thousand pigs go north weekly for processing in Cookstown and 40,000 cattle typically go north each year either for finishing or directly to the factory.
No proposals
However, the big export interest for Irish farmers is to Britain and no proposals of any type have emerged yet on how the status quo of trade could be maintained if the UK insists on leaving the customs union.
There is no doubt a desire on the part of all parties, the EU and UK plus Irish Government to solve the latest “Irish problem”, despite it not being of Ireland’s making.
What is missing is not the desire to solve it, but the “how".
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