The Sharp Talk, the regular podcast from Esharp Magazine.

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This is Paul Adamson and I'm in conversation with Mujtapar Rahman.

Mastap Araman is the manager director and practice head Europe of the Eurasia group,

which is a political risk consulting firm. We're going to call you Midge because you're a friend, Midge.

First of all, about one of the most topical issues exercising many people's minds at the moment,

both political circles and the media, which is the imminence of a deal possibly between the United Kingdom and Europe 27 coming up soon

maybe to be formalised at the European Council at the end of next week.

But one of the key sticking points, as you know better than I do, is this issue of the harder

hard border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland and and of course, this issue of regulatory alignment.

Could you explain to me how big an issue this regulatory alignment issue is?

It's good to be here, Paul.

So it's clearly a big issue.

The DUP clearly has leverage.

They're providing Treason May with her majority,

and they won't happy with the language in the draft text that suggested a degree of regulatory alignment between north and

south I think ultimately for the DUP they can't sign off on a settlement for the north

that will see it close to the south than the rest of the UK and indeed the EU.

So this is clearly a problem. They're exercising their leverage, but I don't think at this stage it will be a deal breaker.

I mean, the Irish government has a lot to lose from not moving to phase two in terms of economic

linkages. They desperately need some perspective on the future trade agreement. They want to

get to phase two discussions. From the DUP's perspective, I mean, what's the ultimate endgame they can bring the government down?

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