Joe O'Reilly (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Tánaiste and thank him for his clear, focused leadership in this area. When you look at a challenge, you look to the built-in resilience you have to deal with it. We have that built-in resilience, in that we are attractive for investment given that we have industrial peace, an educated workforce, a budget surplus, full employment and a rainy day fund.

We also have a recent history that should encourage us. With Covid, we overcame what was probably the greatest challenge of contemporary times, and indeed the Tánaiste was the Minister for Health during that period. We did so in a way that other sophisticated European countries did not. They had people dying in hospital car parks, etc. We successfully kept our population hospitalised, our emergency services going and our vaccination programmes working. While we had tragedy, we dealt with it very well. We have a history and an in-built resilience. That has to give us courage.

We should consider the fact that President Trump and the people around him are inherently transactional. He prides himself in being transactional. We should look to that transactional dimension and seek to negotiate and support the EU initiative to negotiate. It is good to hear the leadership of the EU talking this morning about negotiation and not engaging in unnecessary sabre-rattling.

There will be internal pressures in the US. Various sectors as well as consumers in the US will be hit. Those internal pressures, the impending mid-term elections and sectional interests in America, combined with our negotiations with a cool head, can achieve a good outcome. Obviously, the EU has been a great and successful project. The United States has been a great and successful project. Both have pivoted on free trade. It is a madness and a reversal in human history that we will be going in a backward direction here but we have to keep our heads and negotiate.

We have to build further resilience. I come from an area where food processing is strong. Food processing, agriculture and the tourism sector need to be focused on at this stage.