Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I am glad to have the opportunity to say a few words about the upcoming European Council summit on 15 and 16 October. The first thing listed in the published agenda highlights is EU-UK relations. Apparently, the Council is going to take stock of the implementation of the withdrawal agreement and review the state of negotiations. Other issues on the agenda include climate change and external relations, including EU-Africa relations.

It is probably no surprise that most of us here will concentrate, in the few minutes we have, on the issue of EU-UK relations. In truth, the Vice-President of the Commission, Maros Sefcovic , in a pessimistic presentation to the European Parliament, said that time is short to reach a deal. He described the Internal Market Bill as a heavy blow to a British signature and to Britain's reliability.

Any deal will obviously require ratification in the European Parliament, across member states and within the UK Parliament. That will take time. We understand there are three outstanding issues, namely, fisheries, the so-called level playing field and oversight. We are very grateful that the Minister for Foreign Affairs provided a very good overview on these matters today to the Joint Committee on European Union Affairs. I had thought progress had been made on some of these issues but it seems that is not the case. The Minister said in respect of fisheries that the positions were hardening. I understood that there was almost an acceptance that there is no such thing as territorial waters and that what we are talking about is shared quotas but that is apparently now not the case.

On the level playing field issue, there is an absolute commitment in the agreed declaration on these matters.

Apparently, however, these will be resiled from. All of us want to be optimistic that, notwithstanding our experiences to date, there will be in agreement at the end of the day but simultaneously we must be prepared for no-deal. An enormous amount of work has been done in the past three years in preparation for a no-deal scenario. We have been on the cusp of that on three occasions now. This is the final hurdle. Brexit will happen on 1 January 2021. There seems to be within the Irish Government a fundamental dependence that we have legal certainty, an all-weather agreement that is enshrined in international law. If we reach a situation where we have no deal, the Ireland-Northern Ireland protocols are there to protect us so there cannot be a hard border. The problem is that not only has the British Government signalled its intention to resile from that but it has published legislation and threatened further legislation by way of amendments to its finance Bill which will fundamentally breach those international agreements. I will be interested in hearing later on from whomever is replying to this debate whether we are absolutely confident in this.

Our experience shows that we have great solidarity from our partners in Europe. When push comes to shove, if Britain enacts this legislation, resiles from the agreement and breaks international law, what can we do other than take the UK to a court? In that case, what would be the court? Britain will not recognise the European Court of Justice at that stage. Will we worsen our collective European Union position with the United Kingdom in defence of Ireland? All the indications to date are that we have received enormous solidarity and there is dismay across Europe at the publication in Britain of the Internal Market Bill. We have to ensure that if the worst happens, we have that solidarity that will see down any attempt by Britain to resile from its international agreements and solemn word on this.

On the issue of connectivity, I represent the constituency that includes Rosslare Europort. I have said this on many occasions that we need more direct services. We need to invest in that. We have a connectivity fund which we have not deployed. We have invested in our ports but not our ferries. We need to ensure we do this because the first test of our preparation for Brexit will be whether we can continue to get all our exports off the island of Ireland after 1 January next.

See this speech in context