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

Today, the Taoiseach and the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, were touting their support for the CETA agreement, an agreement that could result in thousands of job losses, fundamentally undermine workers' rights, subvert environmental protections and, crucially, undermine the sovereignty of the legal system and the Constitution in this country and countries across Europe. Bizarrely, much of the coverage of the Taoiseach's meeting with Prime Minister Trudeau focused on things like the pattern of the Taoiseach's socks and his youthfulness when this deal has hugely significant and potentially very damaging consequences for our economy and the sovereignty of our legal system. A wide range of NGOs and legal experts are saying that, effectively, this deal is illegal for European states because it will undermine their legal systems. Does the Taoiseach not think that it is wrong for us to go along with the provisional application of this corporate, globalisation-style agreement without a democratic process - a referendum - and some democratic input into whether or not we sign up to this agreement rather than just provisionally applying it, as the lingo goes, over the heads of this Parliament and the people of this country?

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