Seán Haughey (Dublin Bay North, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak today on the issue of Brexit, an issue that dominated political discourse in 2019 and has been overshadowed in 2020 by the Covid-19 pandemic. As the Tánaiste said, Brexit has not gone away and it is far from done. The impending deadline of 1 July, the date by which the UK must decide if it wants to extend the transition period by either one or two years, has brought the issue back into sharp focus. The revised withdrawal agreement, agreed in October 2019, was in many respects only the end of the beginning. Even that is not fully resolved. Disagreements have emerged around the need for an EU office in Belfast. Fianna Fáil is concerned about the lack of progress by the UK Government in implementing the protocol on Northern Ireland and providing a detailed timetable on same. There can be no backsliding on the protocol and commitments given to avoid a hard border on this island. All the while, a deal on the future relationship needs to be agreed. The future relationship is more than just an agreement on trade in goods. Several other issues must also be considered, including fisheries, level playing field provisions, transport, energy co-operation and law enforcement. The deadline set for all of this to be agreed is the end of December 2020. However, to allow for ratification the trade agreement should be ready well ahead of the end of the transition period. This was always an ambitious if somewhat unrealistic deadline. I believe that the very most we can hope for is a bare bones agreement in that timeframe. There would be no winners if that is the case. Fianna Fáil believes an extension to the transition period is required, even more so now because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the subsequent delay to the negotiations and the fundamentally altered economic landscape.

Following the conclusion of the second round of negotiations Michel Barnier questioned the ability to achieve "an intelligent agreement that limits the shock that the UK's departure from the Single Market and Customs Union will entail."

He also noted that the United Kingdom refused to engage seriously on a number of fundamental issues and there were four areas in which progress was disappointing, namely, level playing field provisions, overall governance on the future relationship, police and judicial co-operation in criminal matters, and fisheries.

In this context, it is imprudent and short-sighted of the UK Government not to request an extension to the transition period. We are where we are, however, and while in the weeks ahead every effort must be made to reach a consensus between the EU and the UK on this issue, contingency planning must continue apace for all Brexit scenarios. Businesses in the agrifood, tourism and hospitality sectors, among others, have received a hammer blow in recent weeks because of the pandemic, and the prospect of a hard or even no-deal Brexit coming down the tracks in the months ahead is frightening. In its first quarterly bulletin of 2020, published before the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Central Bank found that even a basic free trade agreement would still imply significantly higher trade frictions than exist today and estimated that a transition to an EU-UK free trade agreement after 2020 would lower Irish output by approximately 3.5% in the long run. The Covid-19 pandemic could very well make these predictions much worse, as more than 1 million people are now relying on State support for some or all of their income. The Department of Finance expects that gross domestic product will fall by 10.5% this year and that the unemployment rate could hit 22%. A hard Brexit would be nothing short of Armageddon for the thousands of businesses already on life support.

Therefore, Ireland must continue with contingency planning and seek EU support for vulnerable sectors. We must ensure that level playing field provisions remain a central tenet of the negotiations, push for a comprehensive free trade agreement that protects the all-island economy, and ensure that the protocol on Northern Ireland is implemented in full. There is much at stake and there is no time to lose.

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