Speaking on the fringes of this week's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Irish leader Michéal Martin blamed the United Kingdom and Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson for a deadlock in talks between Brussels and London over the movement of goods between Britain and Northern Ireland.
Martin said the Republic of Ireland and the European Union did "not want a trade war" with the UK, adding that such a conflict would be both "shocking" and "unnecessary".
He said the UK government needed to "get into the tunnel and negotiate" over changes to post-Brexit trade arrangements that affect Northern Ireland.
The problem is the need to control the passage of goods across the land border separating EU member state, the Irish Republic, from non-member Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom.
Northern Ireland Protocol
The so-called Northern Ireland Protocol, agreed between London and the EU in 2019, is an attempt to have a border that is not a border.
European food regulations, for example, require that meat, milk and eggs from any non-EU nation be inspected to ensure compliance with EU norms at their point of entry into the 27-country bloc. At the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, for example?
Except that that frontier no longer exists, and would violate the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement if it did.
The 1998 peace deal put an end to nearly three decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, and the physical integrity of the island of Ireland is one of its guiding principles.
So, the protocol proposes checking the goods as they enter Northern Ireland. Except that some members of the loyalist population in the province see that as diminishing their status as part of the United Kingdom.
As a result, Northern Ireland's largest loyalist party, the Democratic Unionists, are refusing to take part in the province's power-sharing government.
'Ransom'
The nationalists of Sinn Féin, the political wing of the now-disbanded militant Irish Republican Army, and who accept the protocol, say the unionists are holding the political future of the province to ransom. There is a real danger of a return to sectarian violence.
Now London is proposing there will be no need for checks on goods that meet UK standards, wherever they are exported.
Europe has responded by saying that any such move would violate the post-Brexit agreement, and EU law, and will be met by Brussels "with all measures at its disposal".
Asked if that meant an EU campaign to apply tariffs to certain key exports from the UK, Martin said he did not want "to get into the details of anything like that, because hopefully, that's something we won't ever have to contemplate".
"For now I'm simply saying, and I've been consistently saying, get down there, get into the tunnel, UK government and EU, negotiate and get the technocrats in there," the Irish PM added.
Asked who he believed was to blame for the crisis, Micheal Martin was clear.
"The only unilateral move that has been made here has been by the United Kingdom government, which has threatened to tear up an international deal signed with the European Union," he said.
