Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank both Ambassador Potzel and Ambassador de Almeida e Sousa and I also apologise now for my pronunciations.

An awful lot has been dealt with. I also thank our guests for their solidarity on Brexit. They may not feel inclined to answer the following question but I am going to ask it anyway. The Minister for Foreign Affairs spoke to the committee last week and expressed his view that Britain needs a deal as badly as anyone else and, to a degree, we need to concentrate on ensuring a deal that will protect Europe and Ireland, and gives Britain what it needs. That said, we must allow for a worst-case scenario. The Internal Market Bill is now in place and we must consider the possibility of other legislation and the circumventing of the Ireland and Northern Ireland protocol. I welcome the fact that our guests have said that they will stand with Ireland. Could I ask for some detail on that, as far as our guests can go? There is a need for an almost hermetical seal around the Single Market and customs union. What happens in a doomsday Brexit situation?

I welcome what has been said about the improving pandemic response. There has been mention of the traffic light system and I would also throw the testing scenario into that. Our considerations are the future as regards the health response, which is changing all the time, and the recovery fund and what we do about that. There has perhaps been too much of an emphasis on loans versus grants. Down the line, we must look at something that will be more of a Marshall Plan-type scenario. How would our guests foresee that happening?

Mention was made earlier about the future of Europe. There are difficulties surrounding the multi-annual financial framework. Our guests have spoken about moving in the direction of a social Europe. The pandemic has taught us of the necessity of public service and governmental intervention. Europe has been very good but, to a degree, there has been an overemphasis in latter years on private enterprise and the free flow of capital, although I do not wish to take away from those things. We need protection for people and some of that is about the ability at European or governmental level to bring in necessary protections. We have had to ride roughshod over certain rules at domestic and European levels to do what was necessary to respond to the pandemic.