Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

On the question of how long it will take to negotiate a future trade agreement between the EU and the UK, it is hard to know. Nobody can know for sure how long it would take to negotiate such an agreement. Of course, there is a difference between negotiating a future trade agreement and actually ratifying it. We may well be able to negotiate it in a short period of time, but it would have to be ratified by member state parliaments and possibly even some regional parliaments, which could take some time. If the new future trade agreement is very close to the status quo, it could be negotiated very quickly, but the more the UK chooses to diverge from the acquis and from the status quo, the longer it is going to take to negotiate an agreement. The negotiation is going to be all about the difference, so it is impossible to predict. It would be ambitious to have it done in 2020, but that is what we are going to try to do.

In terms of whether we are supportive of common protection for workers and people with disabilities across the EU, as a Government we have not seen any proposals on that from the Commission but we would have to have regard to what a common proposal would actually mean. During the discussions around the Gothenburg Declaration, I noted that the countries that were most suspicious of any common EU protection systems for workers, disabled people or the unemployed were the Nordic countries because they were concerned that it could result in a diminution of their welfare states. A common policy could mean some countries moving up while other countries move down. As a country with one of the highest weekly social welfare payment rates, one of the most generous carer's benefits means tests and one of the highest minimum wages in the European Union, we would want to ensure that any common European system for welfare or the minimum wage would not result in us reducing our rates or lowering our standards. There would have to be a minimum floor and that would be our approach to it.

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