Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 20 June 2017
4. Deputy Micheál Martin asked the Taoiseach if he will report on section E on Brexit in his Department's statement of strategy, in particular the way in which stakeholder consultation and engagement on an all-island basis as appropriate is taking place outside the national fora that have been held in Kilmainham and Dublin Castle. [24677/17]
Amharc ar fhreagra5. Deputy Gerry Adams asked the Taoiseach if he has had engagement with the Irish Congress of Trade Unions in respect of Brexit recently. [25568/17]
Amharc ar fhreagra6. Deputy Brendan Howlin asked the Taoiseach if he will report on his engagements with the trade union movement and ICTU on Brexit. [25618/17]
Amharc ar fhreagra7. Deputy Stephen S. Donnelly asked the Taoiseach if he will provide an update on sectoral Brexit response plans for Government Departments as outlined in Ireland and the negotiations on the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union; if work has started on these plans; and if planning has not started, the expected start date of this planning process. [25706/17]
Amharc ar fhreagra8. Deputy Micheál Martin asked the Taoiseach his Department's role in exploring the possible transition relationship between Ireland and the UK to form a stopgap between EU membership and full Brexit, to assist with mitigating economic damage between the two important trading partners and to possibly provide a legal basis for trade to continue between the two countries and between the North and South of Ireland; and the work that has been done to date. [25943/17]
Amharc ar fhreagra9. Deputy Joan Burton asked the Taoiseach when the special paper on Brexit will be published. [25978/17]
Amharc ar fhreagraI propose to take Questions Nos. 4 to 9, inclusive, together.
Sectoral consultations are a core feature of the Government's engagement and analysis on the impact of Brexit. Following the first plenary session of the all-island civic dialogue in November, the Government launched a series of sectoral all-island civic dialogue events in order to deepen our sectoral analysis. Led by Minister, these sessions are an invaluable opportunity to engage directly with stakeholders most impacted by Brexit, including on an all-island basis.
Seventeen all-island sectoral dialogues, across a wide range of issues, have been hosted by Ministers to date with over 1,400 industry and civic society representatives from across the island participating. Two have been held over the past month with one focused on the north west and the wider Border region and another on the equine and greyhound sectors. The next sectoral dialogue will take place on 3 July focusing on enterprise skills needs. A further programme of all-island sectoral dialogues is currently under development. In addition to the civic dialogue process, Government Departments are continuing to engage with a wide range of stakeholders on the implications of Brexit.
The former Taoiseach, Deputy Enda Kenny, attended a meeting of the Labour Employer Economic Forum, LEEF, on 28 February. This forum brings together the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, ICTU, business groups and Government. At the meeting on 28 February participants exchanged views on the potential impact of Brexit, including its implications for enterprise and workers, along with wider economic questions. The exchange was a useful and productive one and it was agreed that it would be followed up with further exchanges and dialogue on a regular basis.
On 2 May, the Government published a comprehensive document setting out the approach of the Government to the forthcoming negotiations, following the successful campaign to have key Irish issues recognised in the EU negotiation position. Following on from this publication, work is now under way to prepare a further paper on the economic implications of Brexit. This will draw on the work to date across Departments, will build on ongoing cross-Government research, analysis and consultations with stakeholders, and will reflect the core economic themes already indicated by the Government in terms of prudent public finances, improved competitiveness and diversification, special attention on sectors and regions most at risk, economic opportunities and possible additional EU supports.
We want to maintain the closest possible trading relationship, based on a level playing field, between the European Union and the United Kingdom. The EU negotiation guidelines state that the EU welcomes and shares the UK's desire for a close partnership in the future. Ireland's economic interests lie firmly in a strong and well-functioning EU with continued and unfettered access to the Single Market for Irish goods and services. There is a lot of negotiation to be done around trading arrangements post-Brexit. Our contingency work is examining all scenarios and we cannot pre-empt the outcome at this stage. We are not under any illusions about the complexity of these negotiations and are engaged in detailed planning to prepare for these.
Ireland welcomes the start of discussions on the future EU-UK relationship, in a manner consistent with the phased approach set out in the EU negotiation guidelines. The Government has heard loud and clear the concerns of businesses and citizens on the need for certainty on day one of Brexit. Our EU partners share this concern and I welcome the fact that the guidelines acknowledge that the negotiations may need to determine transitional arrangements.
I have Questions Nos. 4 and 8 in this grouping and I will do my best to keep within the timeframe.
The timeframe is the timeframe.
Relax, Deputy.
It is accepted that in the next few years we will be dealing with one of the most complex challenges that has ever faced this country and the Irish public service. As I said earlier, we succeeded in getting our overall concerns recognised in the general guidelines. That has played to our traditional strengths as a country and to our public service. The next phase, which we have discussed, is the more difficult one of generating and promoting concrete solutions to our priorities across a range of technical discussions. That needs to be upped a gear significantly. It is one thing to say we have concerns here and there but what are we saying to our partners in Europe? These constitute a solution and solutions to the particular problems.
Last year, a review of staffing and roles concerning Brexit in the Department of the Taoiseach was promised but there has been no sign of it. The Minister might follow that up. It is a serious issue for us. In our view the level of dedicated staffing for Brexit is nowhere near where it is required.
On the Brexit transitional arrangements, there is almost no circumstance other than the UK remaining in the Single Market, where there will not need to be some form of transitional arrangements. It is absolutely going to happen. It may be that the new found flexibility shown by the British negotiators in Brussels yesterday means that they are now willing to seriously engage with the idea of transitional arrangements. That will require a continued budget contribution and some jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, ECJ, during the transitional period. In our view, while the transitional agreements are likely for the overall UK-EU settlement, they should also play a significant role in the provisions for Ireland. In terms of the well-being of communities and businesses, the longer the period, the better.
Can the Taoiseach outline to the House his policy on this matter and what he said to Prime Minister May on this yesterday? Did he get a sense from her that she accepts the necessity for a transitional agreement to facilitate not only Ireland and Europe but British businesses and jobs, as the Chancellor of the Exchequer articulated, quite forcefully in recent times, the necessity for Britain to start getting real and pragmatic about it? From the Taoiseach's visit with the Prime Minister yesterday and from what he picked up, did he get a sense that the idea of a transitional agreement is now gaining far more traction than heretofore?
Go raibh maith agat.
As I have two questions in this grouping, I do not know if I am entitled to two two-minute slots?
I have allowed for that.
Am I allowed two two-minute slots technically-----
No. The time is one and a half minutes per question.
-----given that Deputy Boyd Barrett was being awkward.
Deputy Martin has two questions.
Deputy Martin has a lot to say.
I call Deputy Gerry Adams.
Go raibh maith agat, a Leas-Cheann Comhairle.
Are we banking the questions now?
If we go over and back with every question, we will not get-----
That is what we did with the last grouping of questions.
Is that okay?
Tá a lán ama uaim. Tá a fhios ag an Teachta.
The Deputy will get to start again from scratch.
Are we going to go over and back with the question and the reply?
It is better to do so.
An féidir liom leanúint ar aghaidh?
On a point of order, we started the proceedings by going over and back and we should continue to do that.
And everybody was accommodated.
Are the Deputies happy with that?
No, I am not happy.
The Deputy does not have a question in this grouping.
Deputies should remember that when the 15 minutes is up there will be a cut-off.
And the injury time.
I call the Taoiseach to reply to Deputy Martin's questions.
Níor chuir mé mo cheist fós.
I do not mind. I am in the Leas-Cheann Comhairle's hands.
To answer Deputy Martin's questions regarding staffing and roles, I will have to follow up on the issue of staffing and roles in my own Department. I have not yet had the opportunity to tour the Department and meet all the staff. I hope to do that on Monday. I had planned to do that this Monday but then the opportunity to visit London came up and I thought that was more important. I hope to do that on Monday, to examine where there may be gaps and where we may need to have additional staff support.
The meeting I had with Prime Minister May was only our first meeting. We had a phone call previously and we will have another meeting, hopefully en marge, later in the week in Brussels. I did detect that there is a willingness on behalf of everyone to have transitional arrangements if they are needed.
As I mentioned, the term "implementation period" was used rather than "transitional arrangements", but I am not sure if there is a fundamental difference between the two. When it comes to Brexit, much of what is finally agreed to will come down to language. The situation is very much evolving, but I do not see how there could not be a transition period. I do not think we could have a sudden change in the rules; changes would have to be transitional.
The ICTU has set out its concerns for Irish jobs arising from Brexit. Has the Government discussed with the trade union movement the implications of Brexit for jobs? We already know from Bord Bia that Brexit will cost the Irish food and drink industry €570 million, as costed last year. Thousands of jobs depend on this sector. Similarly, the Joint Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation has warned about the dangers to the agriculture sector. Ms Patricia King has said the European Union's fiscal rules should be relaxed to allow for public investment. Has this been discussed with the trade unions or the European Union? Does the Taoiseach accept the criticism made by Mr. Liam Doran of the INMO who has claimed that the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform has shown no awareness of the impact of Brexit on the State's ability to retain health care staff. We are referring to three big sectors - food and drink, agriculture and health care. In the light of these concerns, has the Government discussed with the European Union the establishment of a hardship fund or a transitional financial arrangement to offset the economic consequences of Brexit?
I have had many engagements with the ICTU recently, but they have related to matters such as pension reform. I have not yet had any personal contact with it about Brexit other than at wider, multi-sectoral forums, but I have no doubt that I will have that opportunity very soon. The national economic dialogue will take place in the next two weeks and it will be a very good chance for me to engage with the ICTU and business representatives on a number of issues, including Brexit.
Bord Bia's forecast involves a worst-case scenario. It is the maximum impact a hard Brexit could have on Irish food producers and exporters. None of us is working towards that outcome. We are all working towards an outcome that will as much as possible maintain free trade between Britain and Ireland. That is something we are keen to do and which is achievable. I do not detect an enormous desire in London to reduce the amount of trade between the North and the South, east-west, or between Britain and the rest of Europe. Britain wants to be able to negotiate its own trade deals separately from the European Union in the belief it can have more, not less, trade. In my mind, it is hard to see how one can square that, but the position in Britain is not to shut down trade. It is not a position similar to that being taken in the United States where there are attempts to erect barriers to trade. Britain honestly believes that by leaving the European Union, it can have greater free trade with countries outside the European Union, but I do not know how that will manifest itself.
I recently saw an interesting statistic for health care staff. It suggested Brexit might benefit us in helping us to retain and recruit health care staff. As the value of sterling fell, the salary differential between Britain and Ireland looked very different. When one converts sterling to euro, salaries that looked better in Britain no longer are. I also understand there has been a decrease of 97% in the number of non-EU nationals going to work in the British health service because of uncertainty about its position. Perhaps a weaker sterling and Britain being less welcoming of migrants might be to our benefit in recruiting health care staff.
My question also relates to the involvement of the Irish trade union movement in the preparations for Brexit. I do not believe trade unions that operate on a cross-Border basis and are intimately involved in assessing the impact of Brexit or any change in circumstances in jobs have been sufficiently involved. I ask the Taoiseach to address that issue. We have called for two measures, one of which is an early warning system, while the other is a regional forum because, as the ESRI has outlined, the impact will vary from region to region. Some regions such as Dublin will do better, while others will be adversely impacted on, including places as surprising as Waterford which is very dependent on the agrifood sector.
Most of the Taoiseach's answers and those of his predecessor have been almost chicken-and-egg in their nature, that we cannot act until we know, but we will not know for a long time. However, we need to start making preparations now. In some of the suggestions I have made we can not only seek out the problems and challenges but also, as Deputy Micheál Martin said, generate our own solutions that we can impose and push on others and perhaps identify opportunities that we can drive that will be of particular benefit to us. Will the Taoiseach look at the greater involvement of the trade union movement which has a unique level of penetration of industry, North and South, and how he will involve it in the preparations for Brexit? Will he look at the idea of establishing regional forums to bring together all of the actors in each region in order to identify the regional impact?
I would welcome greater involvement by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and the trade union movement generally, as well as the business community, in helping us to prepare for Brexit. I will take up that suggestion bilaterally, most likely in the national economic dialogue which will take place in the next week or two. I know that it is dialogue in which the Deputy took part when he was in government and it was very valuable.
It gave rise to the Labour Employer Economic Forum, LEEF. It is something that benefits the country and I will continue to pursue and build on the work done by the Deputy in that regard. He said we could not act until we knew. That is correct, but we can prepare for different scenarios. It is my intention that we should prepare for different but the most likely scenarios.
I would be loath to have Ireland proffer solutions that involve different forms of border. When I hear people talk about there being no hard border, it implies there will be a soft border. When I hear people say we will not go back to the borders of the past, that implies that there will be borders of the future. I would be reluctant for an Irish Government to proffer what a border of the future might look like because our preferred solution is something different, namely, that Britain reconsider leaving the customs union and the Single Market. We do not want it to leave. I told the Prime Minister, Theresa May, yesterday, that while respecting its decision, Britain was welcome to rejoin or reconsider should it wish to do so. If that cannot be done, we would like to see a transitional agreement or a UK-EU trade agreement or a wider agreement that would result in a new status quo that was not terribly different from what we already have in the customs union and the free trade area. I would rather work towards this than be in the business of making proposals to create a modern new border which I do not want and which I think this House does not want.
My question relates to the sectoral plans which were discussed. There has been a lot of diplomatic activity, but when it comes to work at home, with the business and farming communities, there has been considerable inertia on the part of the Government. For instance, IDA Ireland has hired one of the ten people it has been enabled to take on, while Bord Bia and the Health and Safety Authority have hired none. Enterprise Ireland has hired less than one third of its allocated staff. One of the things we need is a detailed response or contingency plans sector by sector. The words used by the Taoiseach were that "work is under way" and that we were "engaged in detailed planning". We knew about Brexit a year ago. The vote happened in June 2016. If a multibillion-euro corporation had found out a year ago that a massive threat was coming its way, it would have contingency plans in place by now. We are aware of some of its scale. The Department of Finance states 40,000 jobs might be at risk. In trade we lost €500 million last year due to currency fluctuations. As I noted, the State agencies are way behind in hiring the people they need. The business and farming communities and people living in Border regions are getting very scared and a year after the Brexit vote we are still waiting for detailed sectoral plans.
When can we expect to see those plans? When will the Taoiseach share them with the Dáil and the sectors involved? When can we get involved in the detail and debate it to see if we can come up with solutions in working together?
I can only refer to the answer I gave, that is, we are working on contingency plans, but we must make a decision on whether any plan will set out five, six or seven potential outcomes in respect of contingencies pending one of the outcomes occurring, or whether we should try to predict what Brexit will mean. The Deputy is right to say it has been a year since the referendum, but a year on we are no clearer on what Brexit will look like. We have had the Lancaster House speech and the regulations as agreed by the European leaders, but we are not much clearer on what the outcome will be. Therefore, all we can do, as a corporation would do, is set out a risk register and potential contingencies and plan for them on a sectoral basis. That is the work that is under way.
Does the Taoiseach have dates or deadlines as to when we might see the sectoral plans?
I do not have a date for each. As I said, just last week I appointed the Minister, Deputy Simon Coveney, with responsibility for the Government's overall response to Brexit. He is in Northern Ireland dealing with the talks and I will be at the European Council for most of the week, but we will get it done as soon as we can. We will not long-finger it.
Regarding additional IDA Ireland and Enterprise Ireland staff, the updated position is that in budget 2017 we announced additional resources to recruit ten extra staff in IDA Ireland and 39 in Enterprise Ireland in response to Brexit. In IDA Ireland four of the staff have been appointed to date and the recruitment process for the other six is ongoing. IDA Ireland has undertaken a rigorous recruitment process across a wide range of channels to ensure the best candidates are identified for these roles. Of the 39 posts in Enterprise Ireland, 13 have now been filled and a further 21 have been advertised. The remaining five job specifications are being finalised with a view to advertising them in the immediate future. The position is, therefore, slightly better than that related by the Deputy.
It is shocking.
Recruitment is moving in the right direction.
In the Taoiseach's recent manifesto for voters in the Fine Gael leadership election he referred to holding special day-long Cabinet meetings a number of times a year. Of all the issues we face on the island of Ireland, Brexit must be one of the most significant because of the implications for employment, not only in the North but also particularly in the South. In the case of the South, The Taoiseach has probably read the IBEC material, according to which, in certain cases, there could be very significant job risks, particularly in agri-related industries. As the new Taoiseach, a post in which I wish him well, has he arranged a day-long Cabinet meeting on Brexit to get his new Cabinet up to speed? It is set out in his manifesto that this is the way in which he will try to inject a little dynamism into what is a rather tired and jaded Government. The Government is replete with action plans with hundreds of points, but that is not the same as implementation plans that are acted on. In the Taoiseach's pitch to Fine Gael voters he pretty much acknowledged that he would bring a new dynamic. It is extraordinary that his predecessor had not published a White Paper on Brexit. That is not to say, as circumstances evolve, such a paper could not be modified or addenda and additions published to it. When will we see a White Paper?
On the different Departments, how is the Civil Service to operate if it does not have a mandate? Furthermore, there are quite a lot of distinguished people with huge European experience retiring from government service, particularly in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, as well as former heads of the permanent representation in Brussels and so on. Will the Taoiseach give some consideration to retaining some of them? I also asked his predecessor about getting trade negotiators in to beef up Irish expertise.
I call the Taoiseach to give a final response.
Deputy Joan Burton raised a number of matters and I think I jotted all of them down. The paper we have produced on Brexit, the Government's position paper, is a White Paper in all but name. Various decisions were made not to call it a White Paper. The White Paper produced by the British Government is very similar in content and format.
I did not actually produce a manifesto; it was an ideas paper. A manifesto is for an election, but this was an-----
Courage to Take Us Forward by Leo Varadkar. I apologise - it was a paper.
I put forward two ideas in the paper I produced, both of which I intend to pursue. The first is that we have a number of one-day Cabinet meetings. This is not something we did when the Deputy and I were in government together, but it would be of value in that, rather than discussing important items as one of 15 or 50 items on the agenda, we could give them a thorough analysis and tease through the thinking of others and try to come to common thinking on the part of the Government-----
Will one of the meetings be about Brexit?
We are running out of time. We will not get to the next group of questions.
The first of the one-day Cabinet meetings will take place just after the recess next month and deal with climate change, the capital plan and budgetary matters. A subsequent meeting will concern Brexit, but I do not yet have a date for it. I would first like to see how the negotiations develop. One of the ideas in the paper concerns an examination of the model of the Scottish First Minister's committee on Brexit which is similar to what Deputy Joan Burton suggests, that is, taking people with experience in the European Union civil service who are Irish, taking people who are retiring from dealing with European and foreign affairs and having them involved in some way. I would like to pursue that idea also.
We must adhere to the time allocated, that is, 45 minutes. There are two minutes left. All I can suggest is-----
On a point of order, may I suggest we not go ahead? It would make a travesty of the grouping of questions.
There are 15 questions in the next group. If there is agreement on Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett's suggestion, we will not go ahead because otherwise we would not have time for supplementary questions.
Yes. We will let them go.
