Ms Patricia King:

I will address that first while it is fresh in my mind. Yesterday the European Economic and Social Committee, which is made up of all of the civil society groups, came together in the Mansion House and had a very good discussion on that issue. If social Europe is not reignited, Europe is over anyway. History has shown that workers initiate counter movements after periods of oppression. That is the issue. Under the stewardship of Delors, there was an attractiveness about Europe. There were directives on equality and issues that affected citizens and made their lives better. If one takes the past ten years, the main image of Europe has been of the big creditor countries holding a very large stick over the heads of the debtor countries and doing it in a way that meant the citizens of those states, who did not cause the problems, had to produce the goods to solve them. It has given Europe, in overall terms, a very bad image. One of the key things is the ECB has no counterbalancing institution. It is one of the things that will remain in my memory forever. Out of the 11 meetings the troika had here, I went to ten and they were probably the most difficult. I have done industrial relations all my life so I have been party to several very difficult discussions and negotiations. They were probably the most difficult set of discussions I ever went into. It is my personal opinion that the IMF was the more humane. The ECB's attitude was "We gave you the money, can we have it back?", while "When can we have it back and how fast can we have it back?" was the view of the European Commission. We know about that. Dealing with Europe as just an economic entity without any reference to the citizens is no longer an option. The European Trade Union Confederation put together a pact in November 2016. Effectively, we are saying we should develop social Europe. We have a pillar of social rights, which Juncker put forward as part of his attempts to deal with the reformation of Europe. The pillar of social rights has 20 principles in it but it is very light because it leaves the implementation of certain things to the national jurisdiction. There should be a social semester whereby European officials go to every country, as they do on economics, and check out what a country is doing to implement social pillar principles. We should start taking the social aspect of Europe seriously and line it up as seriously as the economic principles in Europe. We should start saying the European Union project is about the implementation of those principles. Some of the principles in that social pillar are very useful and very good and progressive. If they were implemented they would improve the lives of the 510 million citizens across the European Union.

The Senator who referred to the voting has left the Chamber. When we look at Brexit, we should look at why it happened. It happened because one cannot keep one's foot on the neck of workers and their incomes for years and expect there to be no reaction. Workers have experienced zero-hour contracts, low wages and no prospect of self-advancement. If people are in that stratum for years, what will they do? Unfortunately demagogues appeared on the scene from the far right saying "We can fix this for you" and people believed that philosophy and voted accordingly. Nobody should be puzzled about why this happened because it is simple. The same thing happened in the US. Protectionism was the same and there was a demagogue who said "We will bring you to the promised land." People were so badly off in the land they were in they said "We will go with you." The jury is out and time will tell the outcome of that.

The principles in the social pillar should be taken as seriously as the economic principles. We should do the semester, the implementation scrutiny and push the EU project into that space. The prospect of it not happening is beyond contemplation. The European project has been the longest lasting and biggest peace project after the Second Word War that the world has ever seen. If it is dismantled it is unthinkable what could happen. We are grateful to the Senators who have listened to us on this. It behoves us all to take every opportunity to make sure the citizens of Europe start to get an anchor back into a social Europe that makes their lives better.

On workers' rights, it is not an exaggeration to say the economy of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland has the possibility of being turned over completely by Brexit. Hundreds of thousands of jobs may be affected, not just in the agrifood sector and not just in the Border areas, because 82% of all of the jobs linked to the agrifood sector are around the towns and villages we all come from. As many companies are tight-lined in terms of profits, if there is any imposition of tariff or a close-off of trade facility that decreases a company's prospect of profits, we could be talking about one of two things, namely, companies putting on pressure to bring down terms and conditions in order that they can survive or closure. Employer groups are already advocating to member companies to relocate to the UK. They do not tell anybody that publicly but if one goes in deep and listens and reads their policy papers, one will see it is the advice they are giving to some companies. With regard to this business of a soft or hard Brexit, tariffs and customs are major issues. It is not just about trucks queuing up on one side of Newry or the other. It is about people's livelihoods. We might end up with hundreds of thousands on either side of the Border losing their incomes and jobs.

That would mean generations of people will have seen their children's life chances turned over as well. I cannot tell the members how many canteens I have walked into where companies have told us they will have redundancies. If one walks into a canteen where hundreds of workers will lose their jobs, one knows their lives are flipped because their income has gone. All the university prospects of their children would be gone. I lost my job in the car industry in the late 1980s, as it was one of the fatalities of the accession. There were 12,000 car assembly jobs lost and nobody cared. There was a recession afterwards. The number of jobs lost because of accession will be minor compared with what will happen here.

We are saying there should be a much more robust civil dialogue between the UK Government, the Irish Government and the Northern Ireland Executive, if and when the Northern Ireland Assembly comes together. We should start to prepare. To be fair to the Government in the Republic of Ireland, it has done some good work in preparing for Brexit. For example, we interact with the Trades Union Congress, TUC, and it is quite surprised by the level of activity in which we have engaged generally in Ireland. Our judgment is there must be a much more in-depth and robust exchange at civil society level. Certainly, employers, trade unions and other groups should be in. I sit on the Apprenticeship Council and the trade unions advocated for decades that apprenticeships should be extended and so on. Even in that small segment, one can see that people are finding it difficult to come to terms with what this could mean. Nobody wants to be dramatic or put the fear of God into people but at the same time we must be realistic.

We met Mr. Barnier and the scariest part of the meeting was he did not know the answers either. I am sure he is an extraordinarily proficient man. As I know only too well - even from the past few days or weeks - that when one goes into a set of negotiations, one is dead meat unless one knows what is the goal. A negotiator might know what will be gained before going in and if that is not the case, he or she is a foolish person. Never ask a question when the answer is not known etc. We are not in that space with Brexit and it is scary. Nobody knows the answer. There are constitutional issues. As we said in our submission, the Good Friday Agreement, the Belfast Agreement, was put together by people who did not dream of Brexit 20 years ago but the institutions are now there, as well as the all-island committee and the ministerial council. All of these could be stretched to put in place a good mechanism and scaffolding to implement trade pieces from an economic perspective. We are not straying into constitutional issues but the structure is there and should be utilised to the maximum. Whether we like it or not, we are dealing with two jurisdictions who will be on opposite sides of the table when the negotiations happen. I agree with Senator Mark Daly that we need many of the solutions. I never like to use the word "impossible" but it is next door when we are looking for a solution for two sides of the table.

We think nobody has the answer but we must find it. We will do that over a period with good engagement with all the people and groups who will be affected by this. That is good civil society engagement with the Government. I am not necessarily meeting obstacles to that; there is no ideological obstacle. Obviously, we would like everything to have happened yesterday. Senator Paul Daly asked what we will do. We are saying to employers that as we can be quite influential on the shop floor, where change is needed they should start the engagement with us in order that we can start to deliver with them those required changes. Diversification and transitionary arrangements will be required. Our objective will be to keep jobs, although it will not be to keep the jobs at any price, as one might imagine. There should be a training and education element and redevelopment and retraining. All of that will be key. Could we stop the race to the bottom? We have our own methods of trying to stop the race to the bottom, which I am sure we should not iterate in the Seanad Chamber. We will not have control over the UK, so we will have many challenges in this regard. We have spoken with the TUC in the UK, including its branches in Scotland and Wales. They hear and feel our pain but they are already suffering. They would like to have some of the employment rights legislation we have, such as that relating to joint labour committees, even if all sectors do not involve themselves in it. They would like to have sectoral employment orders. We have far worse collective bargaining legislation here. Trade unions have no rights here; there is a right to join a union but it ends there. It is not the same in the UK or up the road in the Belfast. All these issues must be dealt with if we are to get to the other side of this. The matters are anything but easy and they are quite complex. From our perspective, dialogue will be a key part in doing the work.