Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I am glad to hear it.

The Commissioner makes me nervous. The core of a proper free trade world is a fair trade world. Despite what people say, I believe strongly there is a considerable amount of evidence that where people get the chance, they prefer to know that what they are buying is produced in a reasonably fair fashion. We cannot have equality. Nobody is trying to force Irish working standards, in terms of wages, hours or anything else, on people in developing countries. However, there is a dignified minimum and it is an issue on which many of the governments of poor countries resist. I found myself at the receiving end of a particularly virulent abuse from a senior diplomat from Malaysia when I mentioned at a World Trade Organisation parliamentary convention that I felt we were entitled to some international minimum standards and I was accused of protectionism. It is not protectionism; it is fair trade.

We have a perfectly legitimate interest in ensuring that countries do not compete with us by the exploitation of their own people. This is where I take issue with China. I find it difficult to argue with competition from India. India is a free-functioning liberal democracy, with some form of free trade unions and a free press. Therefore, the inevitable will happen in India. As India develops, there is the capacity of a free society and a free people to demand a fair share in terms of both income and other resources.

What happens in China is an entirely different matter. We do not know what is happening in China because large parts of it are not accessible. We do not know what pressures are put on people to work under certain labour conditions. We do not know what deals transnational corporations are making with Chinese authorities to ensure that is sustained and we are entitled to know that.

The same is true about Brazil, in terms of agricultural production or sugar production. If it is true, as I believe in some cases it can be, that allowing a world free market in sugar will change the lives of significant numbers of poor people in the developing world, then we must do it. That is the direction in which we must go. If, however, it is not true, then part of what we should be doing is ensuring that the new arrangements do not make many people poorer. For example, people in the ACP countries, the price of whose sugar will now drop, will be impoverished. Who would be made rich? The Common Agricultural Policy did not make nearly as many farmers rich as it made middle men running cold stores rich in the 1980s and 1990s. I would be concerned about the same happening here.

The fundamental point I would make to the Minister, Deputy Coughlan, is that in dealing with this particular Commissioner, given his obduracy and having to be sacked from government twice, the only tactics he understands are those where he is confronted. He does not understand subtlety, though he claims to be subtle. He does not understand sweet reason, as far as I can see. Therefore, the Minister must be adamant that it will not be done.

We must begin in these trade negotiations, both in terms of agriculture and of trade generally, to address the great pity that I cannot now find out where the shirt I am wearing was made because somebody changed the rules. It could have be made in Burma or Sweden. If it was made in Burma, it was almost certainly made by what is effectively slave labour. I find that most regrettable. I do not think the present EU Commissioner will have much sympathy with me but I hope the Government will.

If we were to link fair and free trade, we would have a wonderful world in which many people in Ireland would perhaps lose a little but many people in the rest of the world would gain. What we may well get now is simply a world which is even easier for transnational corporations to manipulate and, probably, to destroy.