The Taoiseach has warned that there is still a “very wide gap” between the EU and the UK over Brexit following his meeting with Boris Johnson.
Leo Varadkar met with the UK Prime Minister on the fringes of the UN Summit in New York this evening.
Speaking afterward, he said it was a useful exchange but warned that there is still a huge amount of work to do if a deal is to be struck by the end of October.
Leo Varadkar says he had a good meeting with Boris Johnson this afternoon but the two are still very far apart on a deal pic.twitter.com/68whsAFbuu
— Seán Defoe (@SeanDefoe) September 24, 2019
“We got to talk about some of the detail of the Withdrawal Agreement and the backstop,” he said.
“I think it was good meeting in the sense that we were able to get into a more detail this time; however, there is still a very wide gap between the EU and the UK in terms of achieving what we need to achieve before October.”
He said the two men did not discuss “in any detail” today’s UK Supreme Court ruling that Mr.Johnson’s suspension of the UK Parliament for five weeks in the run-up to Brexit was unlawful.
He said they agreed to meet again in the “very near future.”
Earlier this month, the British government prorogued parliament until mid-October - meaning MPs would not sit for more than a month in the lead-up to the current Brexit deadline of October 31st.
11 judges at the UK's highest court this morning unanimously found the move unlawful.
The decision led to immediate calls from opposition parties in the UK for Mr.Johnson to resign.
In a speech at his party's conference in Brighton this morning, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said Mr.Johnson had committed an "abuse of power."
"I invite Boris Johnson - in the historic words - to consider his position and become the shortest-serving prime minister there has ever been," he said.
The Scottish National Party and the Liberal Democrats both made similar calls.
