Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate the opportunity this evening that Fianna Fáil has presented, even though it was in jeopardy earlier today. I welcome the chance to discuss this vital issue for our country on trade and foreign direct investment and our relationship to trade deals such as TTIP and CETA, which have been progressed and are under negotiation. In the case of CETA, it is going through a process of ratification. I also welcome the debate because in some ways it is very interesting as it allows us to get a clear sense of the differences that exist in the House. I fundamentally disagree with Fianna Fáil's motion. We have presented our amendment, which is fairly extensive in setting out some of the concerns we have. I want to reflect on several of them now, which is what the debate allows us to do.

It is interesting the Fianna Fáil motion starts with a reference to Seán Lemass. We would all look back and state the country has undoubtedly benefited tremendously from the opening up to trade and foreign direct investment that occurred in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and from so much that came with it, including membership of the European Union, investment in education and our incredible success as a country for the past 50 years. An honest assessment is we have had remarkable achievements on the path we have taken by being a centre for international trade and business.

Anyone would also look and see that there is a point now where we have to reduce our reliance on foreign direct investment. My experience over a number of decades is that each of the reports we have commissioned to look at enterprise strategy, going right back to the Telesis report in the late 1980s, the Culliton report in the early 1990s and the enterprise strategy group in the early 2000, all had a common point to make, with which I agree and reiterate, that we need to start to developing our own trade and enterprise and not be so exposed to dependency on large foreign direct investment.

I am a member of the Committee on Budgetary Oversight. Today, we have seen stark warnings from the Fiscal Advisory Council as to our exposure to a fall in our corporate tax base if we lost some of the big foreign direct investment companies. Last week, the Department of Finance and Trade acknowledged that five companies account for 37% of our exports. This is overreliance, an exposure and a risk from which we have to steer away. It is also appropriate, and we are right as a country, to stand on our own two feet, to develop our own enterprises and to develop a stronger and a more stable local economy through such a strategy. This is the first fundamental difference I have with the Fianna Fáil approach, which does not seem to me to recognise the importance of balancing out and spreading the basis of our economy.

I will speak very specifically on the issue of TTIP and CETA, which are referred to in the Fianna Fáil motion as it seeks the support of the House and the endorsement of what it calls the ambitious CETA agreement to open new markets and grow Irish jobs. The environmental movement, and many of the social and labour movements, have deep concerns that CETA, and TTIP should it follow a similar pattern, would prove a real risk to Irish jobs and to working standards and the environmental standards we have seen put in place over recent decades, particularly by the European Union. The lack of support and the lack of attention to the precautionary principle in CETA raises concerns in the environmental movement that the acceptance of CETA is a retrograde step, which will undermine much of what we hold dear with regard to food standards, accepting GMO products, beef grown with steroids and other mechanisms we do not accept here.

With regard to CETA and TTIP, many NGOs have concentrated on the introduction of a dispute resolution mechanism, whereby companies are able to take countries to court and are given real powers to be able to ensure fines or overcome the powers of this Legislature and step around the powers of our courts. This is a step too far. We are not opposed to trade agreements per se. In the big challenge we face in moving towards a more sustainable economy, we will do it best not when we retreat to the nationalist strategies that we see the American and British Governments now pursuing, but when we work hand in hand with other countries in every part of the world and seek agreement on trade rules. Our concern is the model that CETA and TTIP are following is an old, out of date model where the concept of the market knows best, greed is good and corporations are the key agents to deliver change. Business and corporations have a role. They have a place, but they are not in charge. I fear that in the dispute resolution mechanism CETA enshrines, and that TTIP also seems to wish to bring in, we are ceding power and sovereignty to corporations. I am surprised Fianna Fáil, the republican party mar dhea, is taking such a step and stating we are not a republic of equals, but a republic of equals where corporations can have judicial oversight above the State and the courts. That is not an intelligent development. It would not necessarily deliver fair trade agreement. It is on this basis we must oppose the proposal that is before us.

We have a real difficulty now because we are facing a neighbour on the one side, Britain, which seems to be looking to abandon any rules or co-operation in terms of standards that exist in the European Union. Its proposal to refuse to recognise the European Court of Justice and the regulatory standards that it brings in is a real concern. Similarly, the United States and the election of its President and his Administration, which is openly engaged in a retreat to nationalist protectionist mercantile economic thinking, is something we have to confront and challenge and we cannot accept.

TTIP clearly will not be negotiated with the US Government, which is basically undermining all international co-operation by not accepting the Paris agreement, so TTIP is dead. The real question is with CETA and why the House would agree to it. Although Canada is obviously a smaller trading partner for Ireland, it is not insignificant. It is a near neighbour and tens of thousands of young Irish people are living in Canada. We have very good relations with Canada, but I do not believe it should extend to accepting CETA. We should look for a different form of trade deal, one which absolutely copperfastens the sovereignty of the nation against the corporation and one that absolutely guarantees the environmental standards that everyone says they want to protect. From our perspective, the wording of the agreements do not give the protection we seek. We have to do the same to try to achieve social standards and basically move towards a race to the top rather than the race to the bottom we have seen in economic trade deals over the past 30 or 40 years.

We are at a turning point and a change point in our world. I am old enough to remember the last one, which occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We moved from some of the chaotic freedoms of the 1970s to this world, where it was said freedom of the market would achieve our needs. That became no longer credible in 2008. Fianna Fáil does not seem to have learned the lesson of this, that we are moving into a different world order where the market is balanced by social and environmental rules. That is not enshrined in the CETA or TTIP agreements. We cannot agree with motion on this basis.

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