Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputy Boyd Barrett and possibly someone else.

The Government, and other parties in this House, are guilty of prettifying the Brexit deal and presenting it as a good deal. The Taoiseach earlier called it "a good agreement". That is not the truth. The Government is supporting the deal to facilitate Prime Minister Boris Johnson pass what is a bad, neoliberal, race-to-the-bottom Brexit deal. The Taoiseach even went some way along the path of helping Prime Minister Johnson to present it as a choice between no deal and this deal by suggesting that it might be difficult to have an extension of the process that now seems to be coming.

The deal has even more neoliberal content than the one negotiated by former Prime Minister, Theresa May. It contains the same sorts of provisions as the May deal in its robust and comprehensive framework for competition and state aid control that prevent undue distortion of trade and competition, effectively seeking to ban left-wing policies such as public investment and nationalisation, but it also goes a step further than the May deal, and is worse for it, in the direction that it points for what follows the transition period. It is true that what follows is not inevitable and that is open for political debate and, hopefully, a future, Corbyn-led Labour Government could point in a different direction. The direction in which this deal points is very clear. It points towards a clear race to the bottom and a free trade agreement to be negotiated for the end of the transition period. As Mr. Corbyn said, "The deal fails to enshrine the principle that we keep pace with the EU on environmental standards and protections, putting at risk our current rules, from air pollution standards to chemical safety – all at a time when we face a climate emergency."

I have heard Members say that, in the narrow interests of Ireland, this is a good deal. I will deal with the impact on the North in a minute but even from the point of view of economics, encouraging this deal is accepting this logic of a race to the bottom which will not stop at the shores of Britain but will expand across the EU and exert downward pressure on consumer rights, labour rights and environmental standards across the EU if we go in this direction. Let us take the example of a US-UK free trade agreement, which is something that Johnson is obviously promoting. It is clear that a big ask of the US in such trade negotiations, just as it was in Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, TTIP, negotiations, will be a significant undermining and lowering of food standards. There will be access for chlorine-washed chicken, hormone-fed beef and ractopamine-fed pork. If Britain signs up to such an agreement and there are other declining standards of regulation, the refrain that will be heard in Ireland and across the EU will be that we cannot possibly compete with the low standards in Britain and there will be a similar downward pressure on rights and regulations within Ireland and across the EU.

It is particularly on the issue of the North that a much more serious look must be taken at this deal and why I think it is such a bad one. The argument of the Government is that this deal avoids a hardening of the North-South Border. It does, and guarantees that temporarily, but that is all. It ensures a significant hardening of the east-west border that will not be some metaphysical border in the Irish Sea but will comprise border infrastructure at ports in Belfast and Larne. That infrastructure can become the focal point of protest. The deal also contains the possibility of a dramatic hardening of the North-South Border in future, come a vote in Stormont in four years, or four years or eight years after that again.

In the very consent mechanism that it sets up, the deal sets up a recurring sectarian time bomb whereby the question will be deeply sectarianised and will be posed in bluntly sectarian terms by unionist and nationalist parties, asking if citizens would rather have a hard border on the island of Ireland or in the Irish Sea. It has the potential to have a deeply destabilising and sectarianising effect on the politics of the North and it is for that reason that the only good deal that comes out of this is one that avoids any hardening of borders and does not set in train such a recurring and potentially sectarianised vote.

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