Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputy Mick Barry.

Deputy Adams said that Theresa May does not care about the people of this island, North or South, and he is absolutely right. Frankly, she does not care about the vast majority of people in Britain, but she certainly does not care about the people here, North or South. She has allowed, and I suspect she will continue to allow, her cynical leaning on British jingoism, little England outlook, racism and anti-immigrant sentiment to trump any concerns about the potential adverse impacts of hard borders between the North and the South. If that is true, and it most certainly is, Deputy Adams and all the others who rightly say we must have no hard border between North and South and that it must be resisted for all the obvious reasons are much more muted in their criticism of the European Union's role in all of this. The European treaties were mentioned. Why do we have no control over whether there will be a hard border between North and South? The answer is that we signed the Lisbon treaty which ceded our rights on those matters to qualified majority voting, such that Germany and France will decide whether we have a hard border.

While we know we have a problem with a British Government that has racist, anti-immigrant, little Englander policies, we also have a major problem with a European Union that has a fortress Europe policy and will insist on borders. The idea that the enemy of our enemy is our friend, which has been peddled by many people in this debate, is simply not the case. The British Government is parochial, nationalistic, racist in its immigration policy and does not care about what happens to people on this island, but so is the European Union. Some 30,000 people have drowned in the Mediterranean because they insist on borders, and we will have to fight them and demand that there is no border, North or South. It is their rules around state aid that will prevent us doing the sort of things that would be necessary to insulate our economy against possible adverse effects from Brexit.

We know we have to stand up to Theresa May. Will we stand up to the European Union and tell it that we are just not accepting a border, and that there will be instructions from the Executive in the North, if it exists, and from the Government in the South that we are not co-operating with any border posts and our officials will not man such posts? We should just tell them both to hell with their rules, which are depriving us of our democratic right to set our own borders and to decide our relationships with others. Similarly, we should make our own decisions about what industries and enterprises we can provide support to and aid in order to secure jobs, industry and so on. That is the message that must go out to them if we are to deal with these issues.

From Brexit, Trump and the economic instability across Europe which pre-dates those things, we need to take the big lesson that we must diversify our economy urgently. We do not need to have a strategy which equates to beggar-my-neighbour and see if we can get in some more financial services. To exploit the instability, we need to diversify our economy and to have our own industrial enterprise base, which is indigenous and sustainable in the long term. That is what we need, but that is not what the Government is doing. We require a radical shift in our economic and industrial policy.

See this speech in context