The third week of Brexit negotiations between the UK and the EU have taken place after a summer break.

The tone of the opening press conference by the two lead negotiators David Davis on the UK side and Michel Barnier on the EU side wasn’t optimistic. Barnier was clearly worried about the slow pace of negotiations claiming that “we must start negotiating seriously”. Davis was pushing for a discussion “across all the issues” which is clearly at odds with the initial focus of negotiations which was supposed to be on citizen’s rights, the Irish border and the UK financial settlement.

The British side was reported as believing that Barnier’s comments are “ill-considered and unhelpful”. But within 24 hours European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker was briefing that he’d “read all the position papers produced by Her Majesty’s government and none of them is satisfactory” according to Bloomberg. It’s not particularly surprising that Barnier commented after the talks that there had been “no decisive progress” on key issues in this week’s talks.

Nevertheless at the press conference at the end of the week of negotiations, Michel Barnier identified some mini breakthroughs and said “This week, we made some useful clarifications on a lot of points, for example, the status of frontier workers, the aggregation of social security rights, and pending legal proceedings before the Court of Justice, to name but three. But we made no decisive progress on the main subjects, even though – and I want to say so – the discussion on Ireland was fruitful. On this subject – which I continue to follow personally, as all other areas – we made real progress on the question of the Common Travel Area, on the basis of guarantees by the United Kingdom, and we clarified, in a constructive manner, what remains to be done, particularly with regards to North-South cooperation in the Good Friday Agreement.”