Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Five-minute speaking slots for parties is not good enough for a Council meeting. It runs counter to the agreement after the Lisbon treaty when we had a lot of debate about why people had lost faith in it and we wanted proper debate and scrutiny of European Council meetings. I am all in favour of other Deputies being able to participate but it should not be achieved by trying to deal with a variety of important issues in five minutes. Unfortunately, I will not be able to deal with anything other than the one issue that I want to focus on, which is Brexit, and that is a pity.

During the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, sent two letters to President Kennedy. The second letter countermanded the first. The Americans decided, as a matter of strategy, simply to ignore the second letter, pretend it never arrived and proceed on the basis of the offer that was set out in the first letter. The antics of the British Government seem to require the same response from Ireland and the European Union. We should be determined to plough on with negotiations and ignore the background noise, however aggravating it might be. The stakes for all of us are too high to do otherwise.

The members of the House of Lords EU committee, with whom our Joint Committee on European Union Affairs will have an opportunity to speak tomorrow morning, prepared a report on the United Kingdom Internal Market Bill. These are British parliamentarians who stated in their report that not only does the Bill contravene international law, but also "strikes at the heart" of the Ireland and Northern Ireland protocol and the withdrawal agreement. That is certainly provocation. Not unlike the appropriate response to the shocking antics that we are witnessing now in the final stages of the US presidential election, we must try to remain calm and focus on the prize of a decent trade deal with our nearest neighbour.

We must continue to hope that behind the bluster is some recognition of the economic harm that a no deal or, to use the phrase Boris Johnson likes to use now, an Australian deal would mean for the Irish people, the British people and the people of the European Union.

In truth, both sides know that two strong economic entities living side by side must, at some point, agree a mutually acceptable basis to trade. The penny must have dropped that if that deal is not cut now, people will have to come around the table again in a few months or years, and the same issues will have to be addressed and resolved. It seems to me that the so-called level playing field state aid issue, fisheries and oversight can all be dealt with.

There seems to be a resistance in the United Kingdom to restrict state aid, but there is a state aid agreement in the UK-Japan trade agreement negotiated post-Brexit. The UK is asking for level playing field provisions to be included in any future US-UK trade deal. I do not understand the position. Obviously, all trade deals require dealing with issues like that.

I thought we had made progress on the issue of fisheries. The Minister for Foreign Affairs indicated that there now seems to be a totemic linking of fisheries as somehow an emblem of national sovereignty. Surely we can come to some terms. As I heard the Vice-President of the European Parliament say to a British audience, one can catch all of those fish but does one intend to eat them all oneself or sell them somewhere?

The issue of oversight must become even more important to us now if Britain says it can unilaterally tear up an international agreement. We have to have some basis to ensure that, whatever is agreed, there is a process by which we can ensure that it is delivered upon.

All of these matters are deliverable, in my judgment. Maybe I am an optimist after all of my years in this House but at the end of the day, Boris Johnson may well do a Trump, accept the terms that are available and declare victory at the end. Let him engage in that play-acting if that is the case. As I said, the stakes for us are very high.

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