Speaking at the London School of Economics, the speaker of the US House of Representatives warned a future trading arrangement between the two countries is not guaranteed, and said it would not happen if the UK’s exit from the European Union violates the terms of the 1998 peace accord.
Ms Pelosi said: “First of all it is very hard to pass a trade bill in the Congress of the United States, so there’s no given anyway. But if there were any weakening of the Good Friday accords there would be no chance whatsoever, a non-starter for a US-UK trade agreement.
“The Good Friday accords ended 700 years of conflict. This is not a treaty only, it’s an ideal, it’s a value, it’s something that’s a model to the world, something that we all take pride in.
“It was a model and other people have used it as a model and we don’t want that model to be something that can be bargained away in another agreement.”
Britain Before Brexit: Northern Ireland
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The US played an influential role in the Northern Ireland peace process, and former senator George Mitchell served as a peace envoy to the region for then-president Bill Clinton, eventually overseeing the signing of the agreement between the UK and Irish governments and all political parties in Northern Ireland.
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The proposed deal has also proved controversial in the UK because of perceived lower standards of food and other goods from the US.
Speaking in Davos in January, Irish taoiseach Leo Varadkar also pointed out that the UK could struggle to negotiate free trade deals elsewhere around the world if the Irish border question remained unresolved.
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