Mr. Barry Andrews:

Deputy Haughey read out the list concerning the joint partnership council and the trade specialised committees. Member states have a right to be represented and to attend all of those 19 specialised committees. However, that is merely at Civil Service level. It is at the parliamentary assembly level where MEPs will have a role to play.

The role of Northern Ireland citizens in the Conference on the Future of Europe will be at the consultation phase. There will be a role for Irish parliamentarians from the Oireachtas in the Convention on the Future of Europe, which will meet three or four times. Two of those meetings will be physical with the third one- and maybe a fourth - being virtual. It is likely there will be four representatives from each member state parliament. They will absorb what has been found based on the input from citizens across the European Union. It will be the duty of whoever represents Ireland at this convention to make sure they know the concerns and anxieties of Northern Ireland citizens. We can pretty much anticipate some of those things. Nevertheless, it will be down to those Oireachtas representatives at the convention to feed that information into the final outcomes of these processes.

Deputy Haughey referred to the strident tone of Ursula von der Leyen. There is a major trust issue. The UK Government has consistently demonstrated a lax attitude to rule setting, which goes back to the withdrawal agreement itself, when David Davis said it was not binding. Grace periods were extended unilaterally to the internal market Bill in September 2020. Even internally in the UK, there were issues with the prorogation of the UK Parliament, along with lax attitudes to standards, norms and rules that generated a serious amount of doubt as to whether the UK signed up to an agreement to which it will adhere.

The level playing field terms of the trade and co-operation agreement carry strong powers for the European Union to enforce those terms and, potentially, allow for the triggering of rebalancing measures, which means tariffs. This would be negative for Ireland and has to be avoided at all costs. That is why we need to put fresh energy into the political structures in order that we can depoliticise and dedramatise all of the potential conflicts and minefields ahead of us.

That is also why it would be useful for the committee to map out that timeline of what is coming down the line. Take the grace periods, for example, one is concluding at the end of June regarding meat products under the withdrawal agreement. Another one was unilaterally extended to the end of October with medicines at the end of December. Each of them potentially could trigger political disputes that would imperil everything else in the agreement. We have to be careful about all of this. That explains, to a certain extent, the rather strident approach of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. She reflects pretty well the view in Europe of this UK Government.