Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

This is a quote from Mario Draghi's report on European competitiveness, which was published last year:

In a world of stable geopolitics, we had no reason to be concerned about rising dependencies on countries we expected to remain our friends. But the foundations on which we built are now being shaken. The previous global paradigm is fading. The era of rapid world trade growth looks to have passed ...

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... and our dependencies have turned out to be a vulnerabilities.

Recent events have rendered his words to be understated. Our position in Ireland and Europe in the past few weeks can, at very best, be described as "vulnerable". The world around us is now changing at a significant pace and those forces of change are not acting in our favour. Many of the assumptions we have relied upon to build our prosperity and fund our public services are suddenly at risk. It is tempting to look at this as a temporary shock that we will eventually move past, like Covid or the immediate impact of the Ukraine war. However, this assumes that once Donald Trump is gone from office, or his political capital is spent, that there is a business-as-usual model to which we can all return.

Of course most of us realise now that this is a fallacy. The world's largest economy has taken a sharp turn against the globalised trading world it created. That is the kind of fundamental economic break we have only seen a couple of times since the end of the Second World War. While we watch closely how this major shift plays out in American politics, in Ireland we must surely now have to face a painful reality. The open, transatlantic trading model on which we have built so much of our prosperity is being eroded at its very foundations. I do not say this to exaggerate or to be overly pessimistic. As has been mentioned before, fully one third of our total exports go to the United States. This is the highest proportion of any EU country and three times higher than the next highest exporter by share of total exports, which is Italy. The question we in Ireland need to be concerned with right now is this: if that trading model is being pulled out from under us, what are we going to replace it with? What will generate our future prosperity? What will pay for our future public services? What will allow us to invest in a climate transition? Although it is especially acute for us in Ireland, this is something every European government is focused on now. Together with the EU and neighbours like Britain and Norway, we must focus our efforts towards future prosperity. Together, as a union, we must take the extraordinary measures needed to harness our innovation and our productive capacity of directing the vast capital available in Europe towards supporting production in Europe. We need to do so in a way that decarbonises and digitalises our economy but also protects our core European ideals of progressive transfer of wealth to maintain a just society.

This is no small undertaking but now is not the time for insular thinking. At such a critical moment in our country, we all have a stake in what comes next. Today, I call on the Government to establish a new forum on our economic future. This forum would bring together politicians, social partners, experts, big exporters and leading Irish entrepreneurs to lead an informed public debate on what our economic model needs to look like in the decade to come. What are the opportunities to better integrate economically with our closest neighbours? How do we foster European innovation? How do we speed up achieving energy independence through renewable energy and how do we protect our social model throughout? I understand that the Government is doing what it can to mitigate the impact of the Trump tariffs, but we have to recognise that this is a moment of seismic economic change. Hoping we can ride this out and regain our current model in the next few months or years simply is not feasible. I ask the Government to consider this idea of a forum on our economic future.

See this speech in context