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

I am sharing with Deputy Róisín Shortall.

We have a chance to think big with these Brexit debates. I want to take that opportunity. This morning, I was watching a YouTube video of an interview that the BBC did last night with Mr. Steve Bannon. It was a fascinating 25-minute video in which he set out the case for economic nationalism and trumpeted the Trump regime as having delivered higher rates of employment to the black and Mexican communities than has ever been the case in the history of the United States. Mr. Bannon also set out how that economic nationalism was a response - which it is - to the crash of 2008 and the sense of the unfairness regarding globalisation. I refer to this weird inversion that has occurred whereby the Republican Party in the US now represents - if we are to believe Mr. Bannon - the working class and the Democrats represent the cosmopolitan elite.

On Brexit, similarly, the Tories are getting their votes in working class areas whereas the Labour Party is getting its votes in cosmopolitan Islington and so on. If we delve down there is an absolute fallacy in Steve Bannon's rhetoric. In the United States in the past year, wages grew by 2.6% while corporate profits rose by 26% - ten times higher. There is a fundamental injustice in the world of globalisation. We have seen it in the last 25 or 30 years. The share of wealth that has gone to labour has been too low and that needs to change. The share that has gone to retained earnings and to capital is too high and that also needs to change.

I do not believe, however, that economic nationalism - and a retreat to nationalism - is the solution to that problem. It is because of that type of thinking that we find ourselves engaged in this debate on Brexit. That thinking is happening behind the scenes and it is creating the environment for this crisis. Meanwhile, the UK Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Boris Johnson, is in Peru. He practically has one of those feathered jungle hats on and he is lauding the possibility of a free trade agreement. Is the Ceann Comhairle disagreeing with my disparaging comments about the British Foreign Secretary?

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