Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister and thank him for participating in our proceedings this afternoon. The Lisbon treaty inserted an article in the treaties which govern the European Union giving each member state the right, in accordance with its own constitutional arrangements, to withdraw from the Union and provided for a two-year negotiated exit mechanism, and if there is to be any extension of that two year period it would have to be done by unanimous agreement of all member states. I will come back to this.

The interests of the United Kingdom are a matter for the people of the United Kingdom, and they will not listen to what is being said here and change their views on what we will say. We must be very clear that Ireland's interests are that Brexit would lose us our strongest possible ally at the European Council table. I know the Minister will agree with me because I speak from experience in this respect. The United Kingdom and Ireland are close allies on a great many European issues and we cannot afford to be left alone on many of these issues without a strong ally.

People have spoken about Ireland's economic interests. No matter how close the post-Brexit arrangements would be, and no matter how closely they would approximate to the Norwegian or Swiss arrangements, there would be some form of economic barrier between this State and the United Kingdom. Those economic barriers will cost jobs and will raise costs for Irish industry.

Ireland's interests are also at stake with regard to Northern Ireland. Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement would be seriously undermined if the land boundary from Derry to Newry becomes a tectonic plate San Andreas fault and a line of demarcation between two states going in different directions, one harnessed to the European project and another going in a different direction.

An issue that Donald Tusk, the President of the Council, recently mentioned was the people of Europe have been left behind by rhetoric of a federalist kind at the centre of Europe. People such as Jean-Claude Juncker, Guy Verhofstadt and Daniel Cohn-Bendit have articulated a model of Europe of a strongly integrated superstate federal type, which leaves most people in Europe cold. It is not just in the United Kingdom there is a difficulty in this respect. There is also a difficulty in this country. The Irish Times, which is a strongly pro-European newspaper, ran an Ipsos MRBI poll to see where Irish people stood on the issues that had arisen in David Cameron's negotiations with his European partners, and by margins of 2:1 or 3:1 further integration along the federalist line is opposed by the Irish people. On other issues the Irish people are not aligning themselves to the federalist model which is being articulated on our behalf by some people who are enthusiasts for these projects.

The debate in this country is very stilted. It is between negative anti-European people on the one hand and wild enthusiasts on the other. The great majority of Irish people belong in neither camp, and find themselves without a champion and without people who speak up for their view that Europe should not be a federal superstate but should be a partnership between sovereign states, sharing sovereignty where necessary and retaining sovereignty where it is appropriate. This is the vision of Europe most people have, and it is not just in Ireland this is the case, it is throughout Europe. The constitutional treaty was rejected in all of the countries where it was attempted, as has been stated. The Lisbon treaty was a half-hearted attempt to achieve many of the same results.

Mention has been made of the international trade agreement, TTIP. Recently, I received a circular stating I could go to a room somewhere, I believe in this building, and, provided that I put away my camera and telephone and entered into a pledge of secrecy, I could examine the current state of the negotiations. All of us received this invitation, very courteously. This underlines that if there is a democratic deficit in Europe it is strange that elected representatives, Deputies, Senators, and parliamentarians throughout Europe, are not entitled to seen the negotiating documents-----