IRELAND could be about to scupper Theresa May’s plans to start Brexit trade talks next month due to concerns about the border in Northern Ireland.

Leo Varadkar, the Taoiseach, was scathing over how little the UK Government had prepared for leaving the EU.

Speaking after meeting May on the margins of a summit in Sweden, the frustrated Irish leader said: “It’s 18 months since the referendum, it’s 10 years since people who wanted a referendum started agitating for one. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like they have thought all this through.”

It was reported that Varadkar told May in no uncertain terms that Ireland needs a form of words on how the UK would avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic to be written into the conclusions of the meeting of the leaders of the EU countries next month.

Those words, he is said to have insisted, should reflect no “regulatory divergence on either side of the border”.

He added: “Before we move to phase two talks on trade, we want taken off the table any suggestion that there will be a physical border, a hard border, or new barriers to trade on the island of Ireland.

“If we have to wait until the New Year, if we have to wait for further concessions, so be it.”

The Prime Minister had claimed that she and Varadkar were “almost there” on the Irish border, and that all sides were on the same page.

Varadkar disagreed. A source close to the Irish leader said May’s remarks were “wishful thinking”.

It wasn’t just Ireland who warned May about a lack of progress as European Council president Donald Tusk said the British now had just two weeks left to sort out the Irish border and to provide more information on what London was willing to pay towards the divorce bill While May again insisted “good progress” had been made, a weary Tusk said “much more” needed to be done. Any discussion on what the post-Brexit, future relationship between the UK and the EU will look like can only start if the leaders of the remaining 27 countries in the bloc agree to allow it, when they meet at the next European Council summit in Brussels on December 14-15.

“We will be ready to move on to the second phase already in December, but in order to do that we need to see more progress from the UK side,” Tusk said.

He added: “While good progress on citizens’ rights is being made, we need to see much more progress on Ireland and on the financial settlement.”

He said he had told May that “this progress needs to happen at the beginning of December at the latest”.

“If there is not sufficient progress by then, I will not be in a position to propose new guidelines on transition and the future relationship at the European Council in December."

As she left the meeting in Gothenburg, May said: “We are agreed that good progress has been made but there is more to be done, that we should move forwards together towards that point where sufficient progress can be declared, and we can look ahead to what I have already said I want to see as a deep and comprehensive and special partnership between the UK and the remaining 27 members of the EU.”