Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is great to have the TCA because if we did not, we would face a no-deal Brexit. We would be asking our businesses to spend hundreds of millions of euro on tariffs to facilitate trade across the Irish Sea. It would have been a disaster and we would have been looking at enormous compensation packages for certain sectors that would have had to reorient their supply chain and the markets they target. We have avoided that, as long as the European Parliament votes to ratify the deal this evening, which I expect it will.

The TCA is essentially about putting structure on a new relationship because there is no structure based on EU membership any more for the UK. The TCA deals with facilitating trade in goods, which avoids tariffs and quotas. It also deals with trade in services, although that is not fully settled with respect to equivalence around some of those services and recognition of qualifications. There is a range of matters around provision of services that are very different for the UK. That has a big impact on Ireland as many of the services in Ireland are provided from the UK. Areas including common recognition of professional qualifications and standards is a big part of this. There is also the question of energy, which is very important for Ireland in terms of the all-island energy market. It is really important for Northern Ireland in particular. There is also the free movement of persons, which is a big issue for most other EU countries but less of an issue for us because of the common travel area. There is the question of aviation, road transport and the facilitation of haulage and so on, which is a very important matter for us. The TCA provides guarantees for that. Although it is not a good deal for us on fishing, it is better than no deal at all. There is also the question of EU programmes, including PEACE PLUS, where the guts of €1 billion will be committed to funding over the next seven years. It is the lifetime of the next multi-annual financial framework. The British Government is making a big contribution to that as well. There is also the question of dispute settlement structures and systems.

The TCA puts institutional structures around all these questions and provides as much certainty as possible for a third country outside the EU that does not want to be aligned in any of the areas that were on offer.

It is considerably better than not having it, for many reasons. What was the other question?