LONDON—US President Donald Trump’s special envoy for Northern Ireland said Friday that British Brexit legislation could endanger peace in the province and a UK-US trade deal, but backed London’s efforts to resolve the issue.
Speaking in London after trips to Dublin and Belfast, Mick Mulvaney said the United States had invested “blood, sweat and tears” in the Good Friday Agreement and wanted no return of a hard border on the island of Ireland.
Britain’s new Internal Market Bill strips the European Union of the right to intercede to regulate its trade with Northern Ireland after Brexit takes full effect next year, sparking a legal dispute and warnings that the 1998 peace pact could unravel.
“Maybe under certain circumstances it (the legislation) might create a challenge to the Good Friday Agreement, but we’re not there yet,” Mulvaney said at the Policy Exchange, a British think-tank.
He added the UK government has publicly committed to ensure that no hard border returns. For Washington, how London and Brussels chart their future relationship was “none of our business.”
The US administration was intent only on upholding the peace agreement, he said, adding: “Hopefully it will work out.”
Leading Democrats in Washington have warned that a US-UK trade agreement currently being negotiated by the Trump administration will have no chance of passing through Congress if London violates its Good Friday Agreement obligations.
Trump himself has been a vocal backer of Brexit and wants the UK to adopt closer trading ties to Washington.
Mulvaney, who was formerly Trump’s acting chief of staff, said the administration would adopt a different tone to the Democrats, “but probably at the end of the day, the same message” in terms of protecting peace in Northern Ireland.