Lynn Boylan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Tánaiste. I find it interesting that the Tánaiste is concerned that a Member of the Oireachtas is taking a legal case. What I see is a threat that the State will pursue the costs. Then, the Tánaiste contradicts himself when he refers to Deputy Whitmore asking whether we should be stopping people from going to court and taking cases. It is also interesting that the investor court system the Tánaiste is advocating in CETA has per diemrates. The cost to the State of defending cases at the ICS will be substantial. That is a point of interest.

I have a "Yes" or "No" question for the Tánaiste. Is it not true that the following countries have not completed the ratification process: France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary, while Cyprus has rejected it? Is this not the case? None of these countries has ratified the agreement. If we do a calculation, then approximately 77% of the population of the EU represented by those countries have decided not to ratify CETA yet.

On 26 March, following the EU-Canada second joint committee meeting, the French Europe minister, Clément Beaune, explicitly said in an interview with the media that his government would not contemplate ratifying CETA until after the presidential elections in 2022. The Tánaiste is saying Ireland is a laggard and that he has no wish to go to North America unless Ireland has ratified it. Yet, the French are content in the sense that they will not ratify this until after the French presidential elections. That is on the basis of their experience with investor-state dispute settlement under the Energy Charter Treaty and Canadian companies. The environment minister there was threatened with a billion euro legal suit by Vermilion, a Canadian oil company. It forced the French ministry to change position. If we are talking about being laggards, it is interesting that the French do not have the same concerns. Given their experience of ISDS, they know that to touch the ratification of CETA would be toxic prior to any election campaign.