Mr. Barry Finnegan:

I would very much like to think that we could give it a go, see how it pans out and control the TTIP but the entire objective is to not be able to control it afterwards because we will create a super-court that does not have to abide by EU or US law or the judgements of the European Court of Justice. Any company that has a problem with any and all regulation will be able to sue the Government directly in this private arbitration behind closed doors where the longer the case lasts, the more it is in the interest of the so-called judges because they get paid more.

There is no mechanism to control the TTIP once it is established. This is why 3.2 million people across Europe have signed a petition against it. It is why Ms Allen, Mr. Bradley, Ms Gold and I are here. It is why 250,000 people protested in Berlin. There has not been a protest of that size in Germany in over a generation. Our concerns are justified. Even if one simply accepts the released documents of the European Commission it is clear what the objectives are.

I would very much like to think that our young people have a future using information technology and computers and learning how to use them.

I would love to see the continuation of a genuinely open and free market on the Internet, but that is not provided for in the TTIP agreement. One might wonder why, when a young lad develops a new website from which he will later make money, a telephone company does not charge him €50,000 per annum for allowing his website to be accessed by other computer users via its telephone line. The reason telephone companies do not do so is that it would be illegal. There are laws in Europe and America on net neutrality. There is no doubt in my mind that AT&T, Horizon, Vodafone and other Internet service providers are very clear that it would be immoral for the Government to force them to treat every website in the world the same. They want to be able to charge to have websites accessed through their telephone lines to people's computers. Net neutrality can easily be seen as what corporate lawyers call "an unnecessarily restrictive barrier to trade" or "an unnecessarily and overly meddlesome barrier to trade", as opposed to the least meddlesome regulations. The purpose of the TTIP agreement is to stop small companies from starting new websites and maintaining this oligopoly, controlled by a handful of huge corporations.

On the environment, the Spanish Government is very concerned about climate change. The south of Spain has turned into a dust bowl. Droughts are being experienced and farming has been decimated. Olive farmers in the Alicante area and along the east coast of Spain have gone out of business. Many of them are now planting almond trees. In order to be seen to be doing something about climate change, the Spanish Government proposed that those who wished to engage in the production of electricity should invest in eco-energy production technology such as wind turbines and wave and solar energy units because in a few years it proposed to put a 6% tax on electricity production using oil and gas. This practice by a government given a mandate by the people in a election in a democracy should not be allowed. What business does it have in interfering with the business of a private business? It is not on. The objective of the TTIP agreement is to end the practice of governments interfering with the business of private businesses. When the Spanish Government was threatened with being sued for billions of euro for interfering with the profits of private electricity companies, it dropped its proposal like a hot potato. That is what we are looking at.

This is not a case of business as usual. I like to drink coffee every morning and eat a banana every day at 11 a.m. I am in favour of trade, the same as the next lad, but I am also in favour of democracy. I favour high standards and regulations, but I am also against these trade deals which I have been following since 1997. In a submission I made in 2008 to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on European Affairs I set out what would happen if the Lisbon treaty was adopted. This it is. At the time of the Nice and Lisbon treaties I gave talks in universities all over Ireland, but nobody listened to me. They thought I was a bit of a geek who did not know what I was talking about.