Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I have not heard all the contributions but most of the ones I heard were supportive of the Bill and its provisions and indicated that the provisions were necessary to keep business, traffic and trade flowing in the event of a no-deal Brexit. The Bill has all the hallmarks of emergency legislation. What we are doing all this week and next week, in terms of passing this Bill, is striking in its rapidity and in the multitude of areas it covers. In a way, it is emergency legislation. I have no problem with that. We have no problem with the fact we have to sit late to get the Bill through the House but it is because Brexit will threaten businesses and trade and that there is a clear need for some provisions. However, we are moving heaven and earth yet again to respond to a crisis. Some people will find parallels to the legislation that was rushed through this House in 2008 to bail out the banks, albeit over two weeks rather than two nights. I am not arguing that this is not an emergency or that this Bill is not necessary but we should look carefully at what it does. It raises the grants available to businesses affected from €0.5 million to more than €7 million under Enterprise Ireland and IDA Ireland.

It covers up tax loopholes and tax credit facilities for businesses that might be affected by Brexit so that they can continue to avail of our flawed tax codes for corporation tax and capital gains tax. It clearly flies in the face of much of the dogma that we have had forced down our throats in recent decades on what the State can and cannot do to interfere with the market because we are constantly told that the State cannot interfere with enterprise and the markets but here we are interfering in a very forthright manner.

In the words of the Minister, the Bill seeks to safeguard our State and its institutions so the question I want to put is: if this is how we respond to an emergency, could we see single-minded determination - I would dearly love to see it - from this State, the Minister and everyone in the Government to rush through emergency legislation to deal with the other emergencies we face, such as the housing emergency and the climate emergency? Why can the State not move heaven and earth to invest in State-owned institutions to deal with those emergencies?

We must look at where this crisis originates from because it really is a crisis of the British State. It is particularly a crisis of a section of the Tory Party, who whipped up anti-immigration sentiment and the worst kind of nationalism, namely, British nationalism, in order to stem the growth of the support that was rising for Corbyn and for his section of the Labour Party and to safeguard their own positions. This is a battle within the British ruling class of two competing blocs in Britain and it is all about a decaying British empire on which the sun does not even rise anymore. It is a decaying empire that is trying to reposition itself inside global capitalism to be able to compete with Brussels, Paris and Berlin and make the City of London great again. I come from a political tradition that used to raise the slogan during the Cold War of "Neither Washington nor Moscow but international socialism." The slogan today would rightly fit with "Neither London nor Brussels but with workers across Britain and across Europe." I say this because both in Britain and in the European Union, the movers and the shakers of this crisis have no real interest in or how their machinations affect the lives of ordinary people.

The main issue for us is that this Bill says nothing about the implementation of a hard border. It says nothing about taking measures that could stop a Border being imposed on us by the European Union. Despite what was said here in Parliament over a year ago, Jean-Claude Juncker and Michel Barnier have given no guarantee that they will not try to implement a hard border in this country. There is no declaration by the Irish State as to what the Government will do in the event of a hard border being imposed on us. For example, it does not offer abortion services to women in Northern Ireland, something that we are proud of having achieved down here. After the referendum was passed, the first slogan to be chanted across the yard at Dublin Castle was "The North is next" but we have nothing to say to those tens of thousands of women in the North who are trapped without abortion services. It does not say anything about building the kind of infrastructure that is needed to link the North and the South, such as decent railway lines between Dublin and Derry and Donegal and Derry. It says nothing about the environment and the types of changes that we need to make to ensure that we battle climate change in a meaningful and effective manner. Indeed, it says nothing about the proposal by the Tory Government to dump nuclear waste in County Down and that is a serious threat by the Tory Government.

The bottom line is that if there is a hard border imposed on this country, either by the Tories through a hard Brexit on foot of their refusal to do a deal or by the European Union insisting that there be one, it behoves the Government to declare that we will have no truck with it and we will not implement a border by using civil servants, gardaí, customs posts or any software or online equivalent that might try to track whatever happens on the Border. Therefore, it behoves us to say that the best solution to a hard border is to have no border and that means giving the people, North and South, a vote on the outcome of whatever deal or no-deal happens. The people of this island did not vote for a hard Brexit. They did not ask for it and in that case they need to have a democratic vote on the outcome of whatever happens.

It is absolutely legitimate to be sceptical of the European Union and at the same time to be against a hard Brexit because what it would do in this country is unthinkable. Were a border to appear again in this country, 20 years after the Good Friday Agreement and the progress that has been made since then, it would be unthinkable. It behoves the Government to have a response to that. The best response is to look to the people for people power to oppose a hard border, to give them the vote in the first instance and if there is any attempt to physically impose it, to mount a mass movement in opposition to it, such as the movement that was mounted in opposition to the water charges, to defeat an attempt to implement such a hard border.

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