Mr. Barry Andrews:

Thank you. It is great to be here. It is an honour to have the opportunity to share ideas on these important topics with some former Oireachtas colleagues in the Seanad. It is great to see MEPs engaging more regularly with the Oireachtas and it will be an ongoing challenge to establish much closer links, not just with the European Parliament, but with other EU institutions in the months and years ahead.

The trade and co-operation agreement, TCA, enjoyed a huge majority in the European Parliament following a reasonably short period of scrutiny, but a much longer period of scrutiny than had applied at Westminster. We are now making progress on the establishment of committees. Incredibly, there are 19 committees under the Joint Partnership Council and ten of those are specialised trade committees. There is a vast institutional architecture but all of that is officials, not elected individuals.

I want to comment on the parliamentary scrutiny envisaged for the TCA in the first instance. At the moment, three strands are emerging from the European Parliament in this respect. The first that is expected is what is called the delegation, so we have delegations to the US, China and South Africa - the delegation of which I am a member - and a delegation to the UK will be set up fairly shortly. Under the TCA, there will also be a joint parliamentary assembly and it is possible that the delegation will comprise the MEPs who will take part in the joint parliamentary assembly. However, the powers of that joint parliamentary assembly are fairly limited to being informed of what is going on and to being informed about major changes that might take place, such as the suspension of some parts of the agreement.

The third strand is what is going to replace the current UK coordination group and what had been the Brexit steering group. What is on the table at the moment is that there will be a new scrutiny group in the European Parliament, and it will comprise the chair of the trade committee, the chair of the foreign affairs committee and the chair of the UK delegation, together with 15 rapporteurs from different committees, and maybe one member of each of the political groups. It is very important that one of the 13 Irish MEPs, at the very least, is present on that scrutiny group. It will only be a temporary group lasting perhaps one or two years but, at the moment, there is no Irish MEP on the UK coordination group. Given the critical nature of everything that is emerging from the implementation of the TCA and the withdrawal agreement, that is a significant deficit and one we urgently have to correct.

In terms of the protocol, which is the second item on the agenda, there is a very important meeting tomorrow between Maroš Šefovi and David Frost. We are all very familiar with the tensions that currently exist between the two parties. Two articles have appeared in the newspapers in the past couple of days, one by David Frost and the other this morning from Vice President Šefovi. It does not augur well for the meeting tomorrow. Nevertheless, some progress is being made on some of the key issues relating to the protocol. To be honest, and I do not say this lightly, I do not believe David Frost is a trustworthy interlocutor. He and his cohort have consistently underplayed the significance of Brexit to the island of Ireland, the Good Friday Agreement and the peace process. They have consistently ignored warnings about the effects of Brexit on the island of Ireland.

Mr. Frost and his team rammed through the Northern Ireland protocol in order to get Brexit done and now they are blaming the EU and saying they did not understand it, despite the protocol being negotiated in English between people speaking English as their second language and Mr. Frost and the UK Government. None of this is very credible and it does not augur well. Unfortunately for Ireland, we run the risk of becoming collateral damage in the increasing tensions between the EU and the UK. All of us want to see this relationship being based on partnership rather than rivalry but there are many examples of the UK indicating that it does not want to go down that path and that is very worrying. As far as I am concerned, there is no alternative to the protocol. The EU has demonstrated a willingness to exercise all flexibilities possible within the protocol. The UK Government has to come to the table in good faith and it has not done so thus far.

The final issue on which we have been asked to comment is the issue of EU supports to assist Ireland in dealing with the challenges of Brexit. From a European Parliament point of view, the key issue here is the Brexit adjustment reserve. The proposal for the allocation of funding across member states was recently voted through in committee. This emerged from the meeting of the European Council in July 2020. Happily, Ireland is going to receive the greatest amount of funds from the Brexit adjustment reserve, an allocation of just over €1 billion. How that will be applied in Ireland is a matter for the Government. We will have to see how it operates. This reserve will be passed in the European Parliament. Trilogues, the discussions between the EU member states and the Parliament, will happen from 17 July on. I hope the reserve will be in place by the end of this month.

The Oireachtas, and the Seanad in particular, has a crucial role to play in EU scrutiny. After Brexit, there needs to be much greater visibility of EU legislation, proposed directives and regulations at Oireachtas level at the earliest possible opportunity. This will allow for upstream analysis of what is to come. There have been really good examples of this in recent times. For example, I had engagement with Member of the Oireachtas on the digital services act and engagement on the digital markets act with Senator Malcolm Byrne and others. We need to see an awful lot more of this. I really welcome this engagement.