Well, it's a red letter day on red lines. Just 30 sleeps to D day, if the Prime Minister Boris Johnson's to be believed. That is. We've had a glimpse behind the net curtains at the UK government's thinking on future customs arrangements. Got John Campbell, our economics and business editor, all of a dither last night. This was very interesting. This was RTE's Tony Connolly who broke the story and everybody piled in.

And then the Prime Minister basically ran a mile from it this morning and said,

it's all nonsense.

But it was a non-paper, to be fair to.

Yeah, yeah.

I didn't really get very involved in it last night, which I'm glad now because it's all

sort of calmed down a bit now. But we wait. The paper is due to be out, I think, on Thursday. Comment

statement on Wednesday. So the whole thing will become clear by the end of the week.

Did you get a sense that what we saw was a bit of a triumph of style over substance, that it gave us a bit of a

hint at the way the UK government, senior UK advisors, were thinking, but they weren't going to

follow through on this, were they? The idea of having customs posts, well, it would be illegal for

starters under the withdrawal agreement as it currently stands. And actually what some of the MPs have been probing at in the Commons earlier was to say,

well, what exactly would be illegal? Would it be illegal to have any new customs post no matter how far back from the border?

I think the bigger picture here is that we're into two very differing interpretations of what Brexit should mean.

So the Irish government, many in Northern Ireland, are saying that what was agreed in 2017 in the joint report,

which was kind of that interim agreement, was not only there would be no physical infrastructure in the border,

there would be no new checks or controls anywhere at all, that the status quo would maintain on the island of Ireland.

For many Brexit supporters, they say Theresa May was wrong to agree to that. It was unrealistic. If you're

having Brexit, the status quo was changing and that is going to mean some differences on

the island of Ireland. And that has been absolutely clear. That's the position of Boris Johnson.

The letter he wrote to Donald Tusk shortly after he became Prime Minister

only talked about not having checks and controls at the border, but left the door open to some forms of checks and controls somewhere else.

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