Irish Deputy Prime Minister Simon Coveney on the backstop: Nobody has come up with “a pragmatic, sensible and legally sound” alternativehttps://t.co/LUddstfYmj #Marr #Brexit pic.twitter.com/Yw7uMLYpXh

— BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) January 27, 2019

Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney insisted on Marr that the backstop couldn’t be changed because nobody had come up with a “pragmatic, sensible and legally sound” alternative way to avoid a hard border.

That’s despite Michel Barnier saying on Wednesday that the EU would find an “operational way of carrying out checks and controls without putting back in place a border” in the event of no deal and that his team had “worked hard to study how controls can be made paperless or decentralised”. Ireland knows there won’t be a hard border either way but won’t admit it as it will undermine their hardline position on the backstop…