Mr. Bertie Ahern:

On a dedicated Brexit Minister, in the interviews I did last summer I gave the view that there should be because of the complexity and range of areas the negotiations will cover. I did the negotiations three times on the CAP deals. As Senator Michael McDowell will remember, we were just focused on agriculture with a small Cabinet committee. That was easy enough for the Taoiseach to do on the day. However, it is different when one is talking about the Single Market and the customs union, as well as the fact that the whole European Union is built up like a pyramid of acquis communautairesand a significant amount of directives, legislation and agreements going over years. This is the point our good neighbours have not realised, namely, the complexity of all involved.

There is competition law; there is technology law. I have just seen the booklet this morning by the Seanad Independent group which makes many of these points. Every one of them is affected; there are hundreds of agreements. The point I made last summer is that we just need somebody to be across that co-ordinating it. I did an interview with Stephen Collins back when everyone was in recess and I made those points. Maybe now a lot of that water has gone under the bridge but it would have been eminently sensible. That is my own tuppence ha'penny worth. Perhaps everything has moved on. That was the preparation work that was involved in it.

With regard to Senator Paul Daly's questions, what we have to do now is try to negotiate as near as we can to thestatus quothe things that suit us to protect our employment. There will be many pluses arguably from Brexit in certain areas and many minuses in others. Everyone has made the point about the food sector but the minuses far outweigh the pluses because so many sectors are affected. It is not just food; there are several other areas as well. One has to work from where one is and it is no good flying back to the past. We now have to secure in the negotiations as much as we can to feed into our points to the EU which will do the negotiating centrally. This is possible. The EU is tied to world trade rules. There are 53 substantial agreements, which will not fundamentally change in the negotiations. We are still in there with all those. It will be in the interests of the EU to keep as near to those deals as possible and I cannot see the Union opening up everything.

A point is being made across the water. I had the opportunity of being over with them, keeping in touch with them and meeting them here. They are sending delegations to India and Australia and deluding themselves that they will make great deals. I refer to one of their own documents, which is not well publicised in the UK, but it reflects a view that there is a world of business out there that is not with the EU and the UK will feed into this. However, the UK will want to be close to the EU. The last year for which full UK trade figures is available is 2015, although 2016 would not be much different. A total of 44% of total UK exports of good and services went to the EU while 55% of total UK imports came from the EU. The EU is the largest market for all major sectors of the UK economy. The 50 countries with which the EU currently has free trade agreements accounted in 2015 for 13% of UK trade. That increases to 25% if countries the EU is currently negotiating with are included. This means that almost 60% of UK trade will be directly affected when it leaves the Union. In the same year, 20% of total exports of goods and services went to the US and 11% of UK imports came from there. That amounted to 16% of its total trade. A total of 8% of UK exports went to Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, BRICS, combined with 11% of their imports. The Commonwealth, about which the UK is making great arguments, accounted for 8.5% of exports and 8% of imports, of which Australia received less than 1.6% of its exports and provided 0.8% of its imports and New Zealand received and provided 0.2% of imports and exports. The EU, therefore, provided 54% of direct inward investment into the UK. The hard reality for them in the negotiations, regardless of what they say in their White Paper or any of the other documents, is that they massively need the Union. We accept that and we need the British market but it is every bit in their interests to be close as possible to that market as it is for us.

It is important to understand the scale of the shift in the structure of British trade given some of the earlier implications, which people tried to a good spin on. I know why they did that but we have to deal with reality in this country. I will take a low figure in order that I am not accused of exaggerating, although most of the British trade journals are using all kinds of higher figures. If Britain was to lose 5% of its trade with the Union following Brexit, it would need a 25% increase in trade with BRICS or the Commonwealth to recoup the loss before it would even reach the status quo. My conclusion is that in the negotiations Britain needs to stay as close as possible and we should try to stay as close as possible to that point. If I was there, that is what I would try to do - not trying to reinvent some unnecessary wheel - and focus on clear issues. We should do that across the areas. I do not need to repeat what the Seanad Independent group document states. There will be huge effects on the energy sector and so on. We think of trade as selling merchandise but there are many other aspects.

On Senator Mark Daly's question, I said in the same interview last August with The Irish Timesthat the Good Friday Agreement is an international agreement. At the time, the Attorney General, Mr. David Byrne, and his office, which I had always had great respect for, were not thinking about Britain leaving the EU but they were wisely thinking that there could be implications down the road if something happened and, therefore, they inserted the references in the Agreement in brackets in respect of the importance of the relationship between Ireland and the UK in EU terms. That was wise and useful and we should use the agreement. It is an international agreement and we have every right to bilaterally negotiate several issues other than trade, which we accept is the EU's jurisdiction, with the British. I do not understand or accept the argument that we are precluded from negotiating those issues. I know Guy Verhofstadt, Michel Barnier and Jean Claude Juncker. I have dealt with these guys for 20 years and they do not have a different view. The strength of our argument on the non-trade issues is that the Agreement provides for this. Paragraph 17 on page 14 states:

The Council to consider the European Union dimension of relevant matters, including the implementation of EU policies and programmes and proposals under consideration in the EU framework. Arrangements to be made to ensure that the views of the Council are taken into account and represented appropriately at relevant EU meetings.

The UK leaving is a big relevant EU meeting and this paragraph gives us every right on issues we believe are of concern to us in respect of the island of Ireland and particularly in respect of Northern Ireland to use the Agreement. I do not say this is relevant to trade. I made this point in the House of Lords and all sides, including the Remainers, questioned me at length on it. They also questioned former Taoiseach, John Bruton, on the same day, as both of us were making the same argument.

I do not think we were defeated in our debates on it. There were lengthy debates which are on the record. That is my view.

On Senator Mark Daly's point, I have been at many meetings in Northern Ireland recently. The issues surrounding unification should be carried forward into a new agreement. However, the last thing I want to see as a result of Brexit is any talk of border polls. The only time we should have a border poll - and I will argue this for the rest of my life - is when we are in a situation where the Nationalists and republicans and a respectable or sizeable number of Unionists and loyalists are in favour, and on the basis of consent. Having a sectarian or political headcount is the last thing that we should do. Yes, there should be the provisions for reunification for the future. At the meetings I have attended people have tried to jump on that and say that we should have a border poll as well. This is not the time for that. There will be a time for it, and we should all work as hard as possible to get to that time and convince people and win them over, but do not insert the issue into this debate.

Senator Nash asked a number of questions. David Cameron made a number of mistakes, and when he writes his memoir I assume he will admit that. We all make mistakes. He committed himself to a process before he knew where the process would go, unfortunately. The European Union were not very good to him in the negotiating period. The difficulty was that he got himself into a bind and could not get himself off the merry-go-round and was not given a good hand in the negotiations. In the Bloomberg speech he gave he set out the case very well. I reread it recently, and he made very coherent arguments and a strong case for staying in the EU, but he had already committed himself to an in-or-out referendum for the sake of his own internal party position. The Tories have had difficulties since they joined the European Union, and particularly since 1992 and the Maastricht treaty. I was there for the weeks of negotiations in Maastricht. It is a lovely town, a fine place, and I spent weekend after weekend there. I was delighted to see the back of it, to be honest. I remember the negotiations well. The French and the Germans were very strong at that stage, with President Mitterand and Chancellor Kohl. President Mitterand accepted German unification and the process which would make it happen quickly, and Kohl conceded the euro. That is what happened in Maastricht. The Tory press and politicians took a dislike to the European model from that day on, as far as I can see. They were not much in favour of it anyway, but from that day on they took a very hostile view on it. For David Cameron, it would not have been the finest hour of a European leader if he had thrown in his cards before he checked. That was it.

The Nice and Lisbon treaties were totally different. I had to go around Europe on the Nice treaty and get a declaration, which was the triple lock onto our involvement in the common security and defence policy. The British system was different. They asked the question, "In or out?" and there was no negotiation. If the question is put in such a way that the answer is definitive then the result must stick.

A new referendum at a later point could well happen. I do not envy Prime Minister Theresa May's problem. Her difficulty is trying to satisfy the commitments that her party argued with the out campaign during the referendum. They did not analyse the ramifications of an "out" vote. The figures I mentioned earlier show that they did not, because if they did they would have had a different kind of debate. The treaty changes brought up by the Senator could well happen. Under our Constitution - Senator McDowell would know more about this than I would - we are stuck in a position that almost any change leads to a referendum. God knows what will come out of it. There is shifting sand in all of this, but in my view there will be an agreement in two years time, but there will not be a full agreement. CETA is mentioned all the time in media reports, but there are a huge amount of other agreements. Any of the trade agreements have taken the best part of a decade, so there have to be transitional arrangements. I am not sure how the transitional arrangements will feed into the summer 2020 UK election. If there are transitional arrangements Britain will have to continue to pay into the EU budget. They will have to continue to abide by all the trade agreements. Nothing is out of the EU until everything is out. They are going to be stuck with those things and are going to have go back to their eurosceptics and tell them that all of these things are in transition, not just for the 2020 election but also the 2024 election as well. That should be interesting, if we all live to see it. I do not see us having to worry about the treaty change for quite some time, but it is very likely.