Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

We had a meeting of EU trade ministers last week in Brussels. It was the first time we met in person since Berlin last year and my first time in Brussels since February 2020. It used to be kind of a second home. It was strange to be there again but great to meet up in person. Hopefully, that will be the norm again from now on. We had a very long meeting. It went on all day. CETA did not come up, or, if it did, somebody might have mentioned it in passing.

This is not a hot topic of debate among EU trade ministers because the expectation is that it will be ratified by every member state sooner or later. There is certainly no discussion of it being renegotiated. That is not something I have seen any government seriously propose. Individual politicians or parliamentarians might do so, but not a single one of the 27 member governments has said that. It is quite different from Mercosur where a number of governments, including our own, are saying it needs to be renegotiated to include legally binding and enforceable protections around the environment, afforestation etc. This is not in that space. Not one of the 27 governments is suggesting an annex, renegotiation or protocol or anything like that. Largely, Europe is moving on. The focus of our discussions was China. It was the US-EU trade agenda, trying to get things back on track given the change in administration with the Biden Harris Administration being much more multilateral and open to free trade agreements than the Trump Administration and also WTO reform now the new Director General is in place, and making that work better. That was the focus of the agenda.

The potential for Ireland is considerable, particularly being an English speaking country with a similar culture and business culture to Canada, Ireland will be one of the countries that can benefit the most from increased trade with Canada. The estimate you see from Copenhagen Economics might sound small, 0.2% of GDP, but that is €600 million a year, of which about a third gets to the Government in taxation. It could be worth €200 million a year to Revenue, which is 20% of the mental health budget, to put it in context. When you turn 0.2% of GDP into a cash figure and work out how much of that would come to us in tax, it is actually a considerable amount, and €200 million a year for the Irish State to use on public goods is worth fighting for, to my mind.

Yesterday, the Minster of State, Deputy Troy, launched the first of our free trade round table series which focused on raising the profile of the recent free trade agreements. An online webinar was held in conjunction with Enterprise Ireland which focused on the Canadian market and the benefits arising from CETA for those companies. Some 80 companies joined the webinar, mainly from the ICT area, digital, tech, engineering and consumer products. They are the companies expressing an interest in trading more with Canada. We were trying to help them to do business in the region, make them aware of CETA and its tariff-free benefits and also procurement opportunities. One of CETA's big benefits is that it has opened up public procurement in Canada to Irish companies. It is a campaign we will run through May and June, really focusing on the agreements with Canada, Mexico, Japan and South Korea. There will be a further cycle later in the year looking at other regions that represent further opportunities for Ireland.