Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)

Ireland is on the precipice of the biggest economic crisis facing this country since the banking crisis. The tariff war has the potential to destroy tens of thousands of Irish jobs, significantly cut back GDP and hammer the budgetary income of this State. You would not know it here but the tariff war is the biggest economic threat to the State. Ireland is one of the most exposed countries in the EU to the US tariff war. Ireland exports far more relatively than other European countries to the United States. Last year, we exported €72.6 billion of goods to the US.

What is happening in Europe is quite frightening. We have heard French President Macron call on the EU to take a tougher stance against the threatened US tariffs and the EU is hardening its position on tariffs. The approach of countries that are less exposed than Ireland seems to be having more of an influence on the Commission in relation to its new retaliation policy. The EU has settled on that retaliation policy. It has identified €72 billion of US goods. It is unclear at this stage if the Government has had any influence on that process. The Government lobbied the EU to avoid a tax on bourbon, to avoid a tariff on US aircraft and plane parts and to avoid retaliatory tariffs on medical devices and the agrifood sector, yet all those sectors are now targets for EU retaliatory tariffs. Bourbon, Boeing and butter are a focus of the EU in relation to this. This is a really big difficulty. The aircraft leasing sector in this State has a value of €300 billion, with 10,000 aircraft located here. Medical devices are worth €16 billion in exports. The whiskey sector is stopping production throughout the State. There has been a beeline of Ministers, and rightly so, to the EU to see if we can put pressure on it to take our interests into consideration in this, but the EU has not done so. Other than purebred horse racing there is precious little in this particular plan by the EU for Ireland.

This Government has been great at outsourcing decisions to the EU but we also need to focus pressure on the United States. There is no French-American vote, German-American vote or EU-American vote but there is an Irish-American vote. When the Taoiseach was in the Oval Office Trump basically admitted that was the case. We need to use that leverage, our influence with the United States, to build a bridge between the US and the EU in relation to our national interests.

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