(Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump’s special envoy to Northern Ireland, Mick Mulvaney, has warned against creating a “hard border by accident” on the island, the Financial Times reported on Friday.

British Prime Minister Prime Minister Boris Johnson is proposing new legislation that would break the Northern Ireland protocol of the Brexit divorce treaty that seeks to avoid a physical customs border between British-ruled Northern Ireland and EU-member Ireland.

“The Trump administration, State Department and the U.S. Congress would all be aligned in the desire to see the Good Friday Agreement preserved to see the lack of a border maintained,” Mulvaney said in an interview with the newspaper, referring to a peace accord signed by London, Dublin and Northern Ireland political leaders in 1998. https://on.ft.com/3myZhoP

His remark comes two days after U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden warned Britain that it must honour the 1998 agreement as it withdraws from the European Union or there would be no separate U.S. trade deal.

(Reporting by Rama Venkat in Bengaluru; Editing by Robert Birsel)

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