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

As socialists and internationalists, our imperative in the whole Brexit drama is twofold: one, to protect the interests of working people, and two, to oppose any attempt to impose a border, North and South. These two immediate imperatives flow from more general principles we hold which are internationalist in outlook. We think borders divide people, whether they be north-south, east-west or around fortress Europe. We do not like borders because they divide people, set them against one another and encourage them to see themselves in competition with one another. Workers always lose in this. This is our guiding principle and it is the logic behind the position we will take on the motion.

As to the question of the North-South Border, there is no doubt that the Government and the officials have achieved something significant in getting a commitment not to have a hard border, or to avoid a hard border, to be strictly accurate about what is in the document. For this reason we will certainly not oppose the motion.

We do not, however, have the same guarantees on the fate of workers in the Brexit drama. I noticed that ICTU came out today in support of the agreement, although its slogan, that workers should not pay the price for Brexit, was a good one. This is an important thought and one that has not been discussed sufficiently throughout the Brexit drama. As Naomi Klein pointed out in respect of the economic collapse, there is a thing these days called disaster capitalism, whereby certain people - big business, primarily, and states - use the opportunities presented by crises to push forward their own agenda, and the losers are working people. We saw this most dramatically with the crash of 2008, a crash that was caused by bankers but paid for by working people with horrendous consequences not just in this country but globally. Our amendment concerning workers aims precisely to trumpet the demand that, whatever else happens in this drama, working people should not suffer nor be asked to pay the bill and that any agreement, or lack thereof, should not be used as a pretext to attack incomes and wages, demand wage restraint or cut public services. This is a very important demand, particularly given, as previous speakers have mentioned, the fatigue that is setting in, with many people listening to talk of backstops, longstops, long backstops and back longstops and wondering when this stuff will end. What they want to know is how it will impact them. What we are setting out in our amendment and our general attitude to this is our determination to fight on behalf of working people to ensure they do not end up paying the price as various, frankly unsavoury, political forces politically manoeuvre for their own narrow agendas.

Looking at the leadership of Britain, or the people who have led the narrative on the British exit from the European Union, the threat to worker's rights is obvious. The particular form of exit from the European Union that those people want is that which leads to a bargain-basement Fortress Britain. It will lead to a race to the bottom at every single level in a way that will impact detrimentally on working people in the interests of narrow sections of British capital. It sees Brexit as an opportunity to attack workers' rights and advance its own particular interests.

Those people have also very cynically used xenophobia, racism and anti-immigrant sentiment as a mechanism to deflect attention away from their own failings and the disaster they have inflicted on many sections of the British working class. They want to deflect attention away from their responsibility for that and to attack vulnerable people such as immigrants, minorities etc. The danger from those people is pretty obvious. The other danger is not so obvious because the narrative that has dominated in this debate has been that of Tory Brexiteers, the United Kingdom Independence Party, UKIP, and all of those sorts of people. They are bad, so anybody on the other side of the debate must necessarily be good.

That, of course, is not necessarily true. I do not buy into the lesser of two evils theory of politics. It is a bad theory of politics. The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. When we look at how Europe has similarity treated immigrants, and the thousands of dead drowned in the Mediterranean because of Fortress Europe policies, the idea that Europe is the good guy when it comes to immigration and the treatment of minorities and the vulnerable does not really stack up. Europe is also not the good guy in protecting working people's rights.

As we know, when the crash happened in Europe, there was a determination to make working people pay for it to the extent of threatening to let off financial bombs in Dublin if we dared to burn the bondholders. That is what was said. Mr. Jean-Claude Trichet, the then President of the European Central Bank, said that a financial bomb would be let off in Dublin. Are these people our allies? I do not think so, not at all. Do I trust them with the best interests of working people? I certainly do not. Do I trust them with the whole question of the increased militarisation of Europe and the advance of a military project focused on a European army? How could we possibly do that when some of the leading figures in Europe are now blatantly talking about wanting to move towards a European army?

It is good that the Irish Government, with the support of everyone in this House, has secured a commitment to avoid a hard border. Do I trust either of our interlocutors in this to guarantee that? I absolutely do not. I thought it was telling in that regard that at the weekend the Taoiseach said, "I think in a no-deal scenario it would be very difficult to avoid a hard border because of the obvious fact that, Ireland remaining part of the European Union, would no doubt be asked to implement European Union law". That is a very alarming comment. I made this point when this whole debate started and I have made it successively since. There is a real danger this deal will not be agreed, no matter what happens in the Dáil tonight. It will go through the Dáil and we will not oppose it. In the event of a no-deal Brexit, however, or this deal not going through or a situation where it unravels and does not succeed, there may be a hard Brexit. If that is the case, what the Taoiseach is saying is that pressure is going to come on from Europe to secure the Single Market and that its priority is going to be the market over averting a hard border. That is the unmistakable logic of those words.

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