Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail)

On our response to the Letta and Draghi reports, what we want to see first and foremost is the strengthening of the Single Market. We have a Single Market for goods. It is working pretty well but services are not. We support rigorous competition policy and state aid rules, which is a challenge for us because we are moving into an era when state aid is seen as a good thing, particularly with regard to what the Deputy said about our strategic autonomy.

The grid infrastructure I mentioned to Senator Lynch is very for important for us as well to make sure we can have companies here that can be competitive because the electricity system is there for them. We want to focus on SMEs, and again it is part of our official response to support them in their scaling-up within Europe, which is the point the Deputy raised. That facilitates them expanding into global markets as well. We must also keep our eyes on the global prize. While it is very important to protect our own house and be strategically autonomous, as we said, we must also ensure we are open to the globe, that our companies can succeed around the globe and that they can benefit from innovation at global level.

We have talked about this but we want to support simplification measures and a reduction in the regulatory burden, which is essentially cutting red tape. Being totally clear about this, we are not reducing environmental standards, and we said that all along.

We support making sure we have our own supplies of critical minerals and other products and items we need, but we do not want to close Europe off either. We want to make sure we can be open to competition while also making sure we are producing enough ourselves. There were different initiatives on batteries and other things like that which have come from the European Commission.