Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I will confine myself to two questions on that basis. I thank the Minister for his very detailed first set of responses. This committee has been very actively engaged in looking at the outworking of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement since it was published. Rather than focusing on minutia, I would like a broader perspective from the Minister on the tone of the commentary coming both from the EU and the UK. I was struck today by the reported comments of President von der Leyen to the European Parliament as it debated the ratification of the agreement. She said quite emphatically that the Trade and Cooperation Agreement has real teeth and that vigilance will be required and that the EU will not hesitate to take action if there are breaches. I thought it was a fairly belligerent assertion of the strength of the agreement. The Minister already spoke of the British Ministers unilaterally making decisions outside the confines of the agreement and the co-operation and understanding of their partners and Ministers making statements, basically air brushing the EU out of issues now, except to make disparaging comments about the EU in relation to vaccine roll-out. President von der Leyen said that history would judge what our future relationship will be, but we have to set the tone of history, do we not? What is Ireland's role in that? The Minister talked about the EU-UK partnership council. Will he share his vision of Ireland's role in that and how we can ensure that there is a really constructive future relationship between the EU and the UK?

My second question relates to some of the difficulties experienced by industry. Understandably the Minister's comments have been largely on industry in Northern Ireland but the UK, as he rightly said, made the decision to prioritise regulatory divergence over alignment and that has caused problems. I was contacted by a very substantial company in my constituency which has a real problem with the export health certification, EHC, of all animal product origin. It is the most significant individual change. The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine proposes to manage that certification by way of veterinary certification. That requirement to a vet-certified EHC is taking approximately ten days whereas the competitor companies producing the same product in the Netherlands and Germany, also exporting into the United Kingdom, have a turnaround of less than five days. That is putting Irish companies at an enormous disadvantage. My question, then, relates to companies in the Republic of Ireland exporting into the UK. Is the Minister proactively ensuring that difficulties such as the one I mentioned are overcome and are these part of the Šefovi-Frost dialogue?