Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I was here for every second of it and the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine was saying not to worry, that the agreement was only a draft that has only been 20 years in the making and there is no reason any of the detail would be important. Even a draft agreement does not emerge after 20 years of rigorous economic analysis without the Government presumably knowing what each item in it means. A Fianna Fáil colleague asked a simple question about carcass weight equivalents. What is the legal view of that? Surely the Government knew that when the agreement was presented by the Commission and surely that question was asked. What does that mean in legal terms? We should not wait for the next two years to work that out.

Economists and trade specialists have presumably pored over the details of the trade patterns, export trends and the likely impacts of adding new suppliers and new consumers to the European market. Some 20 years have elapsed in the negotiations so presumably that has been done in some detail. Can the Minister outline the cost-benefit analysis and the complete economic analysis that has been done? The Copenhagen Economics research has been instanced but we have not seen it. What has been done to date? What will be the specific impact on Ireland, disaggregated from the rest of the European impact, and when will we see that? What do the reports tell us about the balance of gains and losses for our economy, sector by sector? When will we see that analysis and when will it be published? Can the Government outline what work was done to disaggregate the overall issues we have seen in the detailed European papers from the specifics for this economy and for the individual actors and sectors in our economy? When will see the detail of that?

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