Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The joint report between the UK and the European Union, as agreed and published, was welcomed by all of us last Friday. It contained three levels of safeguards to avoid the so-called "hard-border" option. Obviously, the first two were negotiated and are dependent on the outcome of negotiations. The third was the so-called "backstop" or fall-back position that in the event of there being no agreement, there will be full alignment on the island of Ireland to avoid any reinstatement of the need for customs or any other checks for goods, people or services moving between North and South.

That has been fundamentally resiled from by several members of the British Cabinet since. We are now told that all the paper is subject to full agreement and nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. The backstop, accordingly, does not exist, if that interpretation is to stand. This morning, Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament's co-ordinator on Brexit, said the comments by the UK's Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, David Davis, in particular, undermined confidence in the trust that the European Parliament can have in the British Government. The European Parliament is to vote on a draft resolution tomorrow. This will be subject to amendments to condemn comments made by several members of the British Government and to demand swift legal assurances from the United Kingdom.

Will the Taoiseach put the draft report agreed last week to this Parliament in order that we can formally adopt it as a position and strengthen his hand in future negotiations? Will he seek stronger support from the British Government to get its own Parliament to approve it and to confirm an agreed interpretation of the words? In the discussions I had with the Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade in advance of the welcome agreement reached last week, we agreed that on these matters, there could not be what used to be called "constructive ambiguity", namely, an agreement of language that we often had in Northern discussions to ensure a slightly different interpretation could be placed to bring everybody along the path.

These are fundamental issues for us and we cannot have either fudge or ambiguity with them. Will the Taoiseach set out for us today the measures he intends to take to ensure that our understanding of the words agreed and the words written down and circulated will be honoured in full by all parties to the report last week?

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