Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I have a couple of questions about the statement by the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, that she takes full responsibility for what happened. The problem is that it is saying there is a veil to be drawn over this, in that she takes full responsibility and nobody should pierce the veil or ask for further transparency.

Is the Irish Government going to insist on knowing exactly what happened and who made the decisions? If it is going to do that, will it be kept in competence? Will we, as parliamentarians, be told exactly what the process was that led to this?

While we can say it is unfortunate and regrettable, to use the Minister of State's language, it is also inexplicable. If one considers Article 16 and the seventh annex to the protocol, it is very clear it had no application. As the Minister of State's statement says, it is a separate matter. It had no application to an attempt to stop vaccine being exported through Ireland. Is it the case that whoever made this decision did not read and did not understand the extent of the protocol? If that is the case, we are left in a situation not merely in which damage was done but the operation of protocol is in the hands of people who do not understand it. I ask the Minister of State to comment on that.

I appreciate the Irish Government's position is that negotiations on the protocol between the UK and the EU is a bilateral process. It is not a multilateral process in which we step in or out. However, it seems that since we have a very clear national interest in this matter, we should have a de facto presence in the process of negotiation between the vice-president with responsibility for trade and the UK Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Michael Gove, and their officials, so we can see for ourselves that what is being negotiated is reasonable and not damaging to us.

There should be transparency and that the Irish public and the European Parliament are entitled to know what happened. There must be some mechanism so that people who are in charge of any process involving the Irish protocol understand when it cannot, legally, be deployed. If the same people who invoked Article 16 are conducting the trade negotiations, Ireland needs the maximum transparency for the Irish Government, either with a de factopresence or some form of immediate consultation on the process of negotiations to make the movement of goods between the UK and Northern Ireland as transparent as possible.