Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Fuel smuggling is obviously a great cost to the State in terms of tax that is not paid into Revenue. It is obviously a great cost to the people who are trying to function along the Border, maintaining the law and ensuring they are selling proper product. Let us imagine there was a way to stop fuel smuggling. Let us imagine if fuel taxes on both side of the Border were equal. Let us imagine if the cost of diesel, petrol or any fuel were the same in south Armagh as it is in north Monaghan. That would obviously take away the incentive to smuggle and reduce the cost to police smuggling, which would be a further win for the State.

Let us imagine we had a government with the political will to seek to bring the taxation powers governing excise on fuel to the North of Ireland so that on the island of Ireland we could organise it for ourselves. That would be a sunny day. That opportunity is in the Government's gift. Our party has won getting corporation tax powers back to Ireland. There is no reason that other taxation powers and fiscal powers that are logical could not also be brought back to Ireland North and South.

This is a mainly technical Bill which consolidates much existing legislation related to our customs system. I say "our" customs system but in reality our system is just a cog in a bigger EU customs machine. While the content of the Bill is described as consolidating and technical I would like to deal with a number of issues that jump out on reading it.

Section 6 deals with customs ports and airports. I am curious as to whether military aircraft using Shannon Airport, for example, are subject to the provisions of this section. Sections 10 and 11 also deal with the procedures to do with aircraft landing and leaving, and refer to all aircraft having to comply "unless otherwise authorised or exempted". How does an aircraft receive such an exemption? The same applies to foreign naval vessels that occasionally visit us. Under what grounds are they exempt from customs?

The Bill refers to Type I and Type II airports. Type II airports are subject to extra requirements. Is there a list of which airports are Type I and which are Type II? How many aircraft or vessels are known to have landed without the knowledge of Customs and Excise in 2014 and previous years?

The accompanying memorandum points to two new subsections. The first in section 17 allows for goods under official control to be forfeited if customs duty is not paid. The new subsection in section 33 allows for the detaining of goods which the Garda or other relevant authority believe may be required as evidence. The goods can be held "for such period of time as may be required to determine if they are so required as evidence". I am not convinced the wording here is sufficient to prevent a possible abuse of this section to detain goods for long periods of time under the pretence that they might one day be used as evidence.

Last year the Revenue Commissioners sold €213,385 worth of seized goods. That is not an insignificant amount. Is that money kept by Revenue or channelled to charitable organisations or some other worthy cause?

Section 22 is worthy of some scrutiny. It seems to give immunity from any sort of legal recourse to anybody hurt or who has property damaged by officers carrying out a seizure or detention. I ask the Minister to clarify the meaning of that section.

Sections 44 to 46 suffer from what is a common flaw in some legislation. Appeals are effectively dealt with in house through the appeals commissioner appointed by the Minister. I note the legislative programme has a Bill which will presumably bring about some change to this system. In the meantime this legislation only allows an appeal to the courts and only to the less accessible High Court on a point of law. This is a common mechanism used in consumer protection, for example, and I believe its purpose is sometimes to discourage or simply prohibit by means of cost a legal challenge to how the State operates. I ask the Minister to outline his thoughts on this issue.

The main purpose of this Bill is to reiterate the State's assent to EU-wide rules on customs through the Naples II convention and the CIS system. The Customs Information System deals with a huge amount of personal data and clearly it is important that proper data protection systems are in place. Have any breaches of data occurred since the system came into place?

While an EU-wide approach to customs has some practical advantages it can also have drawbacks. For example goods labelled as Israeli are given preferential treatment under EU-Israel agreements but they may, in fact, originate in the illegally occupied territories of Palestine. It seems the procedure in doubtful cases is to confirm the details with the country of origin. In other words, all Israel has to do is to confirm the goods are not from the illegally occupied territories and there is nothing that can to be done. The State could ban goods from the settlements on human rights grounds, but it has not tried to do so. Obviously in recent weeks on the back of a Sinn Féin Private Members' motion, the Oireachtas gave a promise to recognise the State of Palestine, which is also important in this regard.

More broadly a Customs Union means setting trade rules at an EU level. The most topical example of this is the proposed transatlantic trade and investment partnership, TTIP. The TTIP is probably one of the most challenging and dangerous agreements being negotiated and discussed at EU level, most of it behind closed doors and most of it without any information seeping out. It cedes massive sovereignty from the Irish people to the dispute mechanism, which is completely out of our hands. It means to a certain extent that private companies can sue the Government regarding policy changes if those policy changes negatively impact on the profitability of those businesses.

The promises for job creation are very dubious. Those figures do not stand up to scrutiny. The most damaging element of TTIP is the investor state dispute settlement mechanism, ISDS. From what we know of this mechanism it is designed to cause damage to states that want to use policy in future to the betterment of its citizens. For example, the Government's plan to introduce non-branded cigarette packaging has come under scrutiny recently. The European Commission, the American Chamber of Commerce and a number of organisations have started to focus on this. It is very dangerous if governments cannot decide policy for fear that private corporations could sue them through the ISDS.

Other issues such as fracking and farming may be threatened with regard to this. Environmentalists, trade unionists, farmers and many civil society groups have raised huge concerns about what TTIP will actually mean for Ireland and the rest of Europe.

It is important to understand in the context of the customs union. My party is happy to support the passage of the Bill to Committee Stage where we will examine it in detail and possibly propose some amendments based on the issues I spoke about today.

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