Hammond says cabinet has not had specific discussion about final Brexit outcome it wants - Politics live

Leo Varadkar, the Irish prime minister, is facing calls to “pick up the phone” to Arlene Foster to try and repair relations between Belfast and Dublin in a bid to finesse an Irish border deal.

Just two days after the Democratic Unionist Party leader torpedoed the Brexit deal, Varadkar faced questions in the Irish parliament about the deterioration of north-south relations, now at their most strained in decades.

“If we are to listen you are going to have to pick up the phone and talk to Arlene at some point. Have you any plans for that? And what she seems to be saying in recent days is that they were completely outside the loop for five weeks, didn’t know what the text was, didn’t know what the structure was [of the border deal],” said Green Party TD Eamon Ryan.

His questions came following accusations by Foster on Tuesday night that Ireland had been trying to push a united Ireland agenda and had approached the Irish border issue “aggressively”.

Varadkar ducked the direct question sticking to line that Ireland was part of team Europe and the lines of communication were London/Belfast and Ireland/Brussels.

He suggested the DUP should not get special treatment just because they are in a confidence and supply arrangement because that they were not the only party in Northern Ireland. Speaking in leader’s questions in the Dail, he said:

I would think it appropriate that all parties should be seeing the text at the same time. Obviously the European commission with our involvement negotiates on one side with the UK government on the other, but at the point at which texts are being shared with political parties I don’t see why the green party, which is north and south, shouldn’t see the text at same time as Sinn Fein and Fianna Fail and the DUP.

Varadkar was also asked if Ireland’s premature pronouncements on the impending agreement on Monday morning had helped scupper the deal.

He told the Dail that he had not spoken to media until Monday evening after the deal had gone sour.

Varadkar told TDs he expected to talk to Theresa May “in the coming days”. Sources say a call has not been scheduled for today.