Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I am standing very close to our guest. I add my welcome and that of my Labour Party colleagues to Monsieur Barnier. Although my speaking time is very brief, I will use my proximity to him to emphasise the points I want to make. Mr. Barnier and I met many years ago. We were both environment Ministers. I know his commitment to the ideals of Europe. I also know he appreciates that the Brexit negotiating mandate is about our vital national interests and the vital interests of this island as a whole.

We have many concerns. We are an island off an island off the mainland of Europe. Inevitably, our geography must dictate our policies and our priorities. The negotiating guidelines, with their insistence on an orderly first-things-first approach, postpone until later consideration of what for us will be, in fact, most vital interests. To be specific, while the guidelines do recognise the special position of Northern Ireland, albeit with the real challenges that others have already underscored, they do not sufficiently recognise the unique challenges that would be faced by us south of the Border. For us, Brexit means that the idea of achieving the European Single Market has been set back a generation. That is the undeniable truth. To put it bluntly, once the United Kingdom leaves, it will no longer make any real, practical day-to-day sense for us to talk about membership of a true single market in regard to the goods and services that we import and export. Talk of the Single Market will, from our perspective, revert from being almost a practical reality that we almost had fully achieved towards something more closely resembling an aspiration.

As I stated earlier, the basic reason is one of geography. There will, in future, be a large chunk of non-Europe between us and the rest of the Union. Brexit will impact on every aspect of our economic, social and cultural lives. It will impact on every network to which we are already connected. This includes, in physical and infrastructural terms, our transport, energy and telecommunications networks. Therefore, it will impact on Ireland's ability to adhere to EU law. It will affect, for example, our ability to comply with the EU directive requiring a single EU market in electricity since our only power connections are with Northern Ireland and Britain. Another directive requires EU-wide television without frontiers when most of our external television programming comes from Britain.

EU directives are based on internal markets, common markets and interconnectedness. They are designed to cover enormous territories and immense distances and to bring them together as one. They are not designed to leapfrog over other countries operating completely distinct and separate rules, to which we in Ireland will nonetheless remain truly tied in terms of geography, infrastructure, networks and trade. Our challenge after Brexit, therefore, is for Ireland to adhere to policies and laws that were designed for an internal EU market when we will find ourselves removed from direct access to that market, having few direct infrastructural connections and remaining connected instead to a country outside the Union.

All these factors make Ireland's case unique in the negotiations Mr. Barnier is about to lead on our behalf. I hope the views expressed by Members in the few short minutes we have here and in the ongoing dialogue we will have with him will make sure that he will bring as effective as possible a conclusion in our interests.

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