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

This deal should be opposed completely. The Government should oppose this deal if it cares at all and if there is any meaning to its concerns about the environment, the protection of human rights and the protection of the interests of farmers. Any equivocation about that exposes whose agenda this Government and the EU are really championing, namely the agenda of big business and major corporations which could not give a hoot about climate change, the environment, the struggle of our farmers to maintain a livelihood or the struggles of indigenous people and small producers in the Mercosur countries themselves. All of those will lose out as a result of this agreement. That is extraordinary when all of the debate in this country and globally is about the need for emergency action. The Government says it is interested in the climate emergency yet it wants to sign off a deal under which we will export fossil-fuel-guzzling German cars to Mercosur countries in order that they can send us beef which is produced by cutting down thousands of square km of rainforest. Goods will travel thousands of miles to Europe, leading to more greenhouse gas emissions being pumped out, while we send manufactured cars over there to pump out more. This beggars belief. The irony is that the entire country has been gripped by the fear of Brexit but this agreement is Brexit writ large and on a scale ten to 15 times greater in respect of the race to the bottom these deals promote. It is truly shocking.

The Government states that it will carry out an economic assessment of how the deal will impact on our economy. I say, "Farmers of Ireland, beware; the sell-out is coming". Just as the fishing industry was sold out to Europe, farmers will now be sold out for the benefit of certain manufacturers, particularly in the pharmaceutical and medical instruments industries. Farmers across Europe are about to be sold out for the benefit of the German car industry. It is not just about that, however, it is also about the globe. It is about the planet that the Government states it cares so much about. In the past ten years, rainforest covering the same amount of land as Portugal has been cut down. Bolsonaro is stating unequivocally that he is a climate change denier. He does not give a damn about the climate and he is waging a war against the indigenous people, small farmers and small producers, crushing their human rights and cutting down these forests to produce cheap, lower-quality beef for the benefit of the ranchers and major agricultural producers of Latin America. This deal should be opposed root and branch. Anything less is a sell-out.

My final point is a bit of an "I told you so" but it has to be made. This deal is the reason the left opposed the Lisbon treaty and the other treaties that introduced qualified majority voting on global trade deals. We said they would lead to what we see here; an attack on environmental standards and an attack on small producers and SMEs. The chickens have come home to roost on the rotten deals signed up to by Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, the Labour Party and so on.

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