Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

In recent weeks and months I have been critical of the Government with regard to its approach to Brexit. It has been my consistent view that whatever about behind the scenes work, and we cannot obviously know exactly what is going on, there is a need for the Government to expand the concrete visible actions to be taken to protect our nation from the known fall-out of Brexit and do the proper analysis to ascertain the unknown. This remains the case and I will come back to this point.

It is worth acknowledging one of the successes of the behind the scenes work. Others may be a bit more mealy-mouthed, and we all recognise the precedent the Good Friday Agreement created in this area. Despite all of this, the agreement on the European future of this island, that in the event of a future vote for reunification the integrated entity of Ireland would be a formal part of the European Union, was a diplomatic success. The work of our diplomats and Ministers in achieving this deserves recognition and acknowledgement here and I give it.

Much more concerning is the continued assertion from Downing Street that no deal is better than a bad deal. In truth, no deal is the worst possible deal. In the event of such an outcome the island of Ireland will suffer significant collateral damage. It has been my view for some time that Brexit is likely to have a transformative impact on the island, and will have as great an impact as the Anglo-Irish Agreement or the Good Friday Agreement were in their time. One of the factors in ensuring both these Agreements were positive was the intellectual engagement between political parties North and South in advance of them actually being finalised. The New Ireland Forum and the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation were both imperfect but both allowed for the type of detailed engagement between parties on this island that could begin to point towards productive avenues for engagement in renegotiation. The Labour Party believes now is an opportune time to create a new forum or a new convention on the future of this island. I will write to the Taoiseach this week with further details on my thoughts in this area.

I heard the Taoiseach's answer today that the Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement is the appropriate forum to consider these issues. It is not because it is confined to the Houses. It is confined to the parties represented in these Houses. We need a much more open and broader forum to signal our openness to hearing views which are not captured by the representatives in the House.

I said I would return to the need for more concrete action by the Government to protect all of us from the potential impact of Brexit. In recent months I have said repeatedly in the Chamber that every party has been speaking about Brexit, but the Labour Party has put forward concrete tangible specific enumerated actions which would protect Ireland against a hard Brexit. Brexit will impact every sector in ways that cannot yet be fully determined. It will dominate public discourse for the next decade and present numerous challenges for the State. Many problems will be addressed as they arise, but there are practical steps Ireland could take now and things we can do in advance of any actual impact, and we need to set about doing them now. Nine months on from the referendum we should have seen some detail on the practical steps the Government will take, and perhaps in the coming hours we will see them. As other Deputies have said, it is indicative of a lack of thought that we are having this debate before we will be briefed on the constructive proposals of the Government. It seems to be a case of putting the cart before the horse.

That we still have only broad policy objectives on the common travel area, the prevention of a hard Border and protecting the peace process is not good enough. Perhaps in the next hour or two when we are briefed directly we will see more concrete proposals. The Labour Party has been calling for a Brexit early warning system to be put in place. Such an all-island system would bring together trade unions, employers and specific stakeholders in each sector. It would help identify not only the sectors but the individual firms and companies at risk as market conditions change and help them to adapt. We also call for state aid rules to be suspended for two years from the date of Brexit. This should be negotiated and accepted by our EU colleagues. With this, a €250 million Brexit trade adjustment fund should be specifically established to directly support businesses suffering from trade upheavals with the dislodgement of markets within the United Kingdom. Regional fora need to be established to help foster and create new jobs and support current ones. As we have said repeatedly, the impact of Brexit will not be uniform. Those of us who have been briefed by the ESRI on its detailed analysis know some geographical sectors as well as business sectors in our country will be badly impacted and we need to be ahead of the curve in protecting them.

These fora could work in tandem with the early warning system in order to Brexit-proof our regions.

The Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation needs to re-examine the regional action plan for jobs, because Brexit has changed things. These plans were drawn up in 2015 and 2016, and they will already be redundant in many aspects. We need a full analysis of the potential and the risk to employment in our regions. In the worst-case scenario, were a hard Border to come into being between the North and the South, an arsenal of funding must be available to protect those worst-affected. As I have pointed out in Taoiseach's Questions, we also need new transport connections to Europe and a major investment programme in our ports would be needed to deal with the issue of landbridge services and to have alternative direct market access. Ports needing investment include Rosslare Europort, which is in my own constituency, and also in Dublin, Cork, Foynes and elsewhere.

I repeatedly called for the rules on the European Globalisation Adjustment Fund, EGAF, to be amended and made available to re-skill those workers who will be impacted. We can identify them now. The current EGAF programme is undergoing a mid-term evaluation, so the rules can change, but we need to engage with the Commission now to deal with that. We also believe that the Oireachtas Joint Committee on European Union Affairs should hold public hearings. The Seanad has now set up the Seanad Special Committee on the Withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union. While Taoiseach's Questions has functioned as our way to tease out things over the last year or so, the Oireachtas now needs to speak with one voice rather than through a multiplicity of voices.

We are also concerned at the prospect of the status of the English language being used as a possible negotiating point. It sounds impossible, but the head of the European Parliament's constitutional affairs committee, Ms Danuta Hübner, with whom I worked very closely when she was chair of the regional affairs committee and with whom I negotiated the cohesion funding, has said that English will not be one of the European Union's official languages once the UK leaves. We need to remove all doubt, and the Irish Government should inform the EU that it intends to notify English as well as Irish as an official EU language, so there should be no problem about that.

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