Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

Finally we have a debate - two and a half hours on what is the most serious attack on the environmental, labour, consumer and democratic rights of almost 1 billion people. That is how seriously the Government takes it. In reality, among all of the governments in the European Union, the Government is one of the biggest fans of TTIP and all its most odious parts.

TTIP is a charter for corporate rights. It very consciously places the right of big corporations to profit above the rights of ordinary people to decent wages, a safe environment and proper consumer rights. It gives the corporations the right to sue governments that interfere with their right to profit and also gives them special access to the writing of regulations so they are written in the corporations' interests.

There is free trade between the EU and the US. The average tariff for US imports into the EU is 3.5%, while the other way around it is 5%. This is not about free trade; 80% of the so-called estimated benefits of the agreement come from what are called "non-tariff barriers". Non-tariff barriers are those things that the rest of us would call environmental legislation, labour legislation, health, consumer and financial regulations. This is a race to the bottom of the Atlantic in all of those regulations in the interests of major corporations. These are not negotiations between the representatives of ordinary people in the EU and in the US. As John Hilary said, TTIP is correctly understood not as a negotiation between two competing trading partners but as an assault on European and US societies by transnational corporations seeking to remove regulatory barriers to their activities on both sides of the Atlantic. The big corporations are dominating the meetings with the Commission. Some 90% of the meetings the Commission is having with so-called stakeholders are with representatives of the big corporations.

The way they will do it is precisely through the ISDS mechanism. We can rename it whatever we like but, in reality, what this means it is a right to sue any government that interferes with the right to profit, where expropriation is defined extremely broadly and includes measures tantamount to expropriation, indirect expropriation and regulatory expropriation. If a country does anything that interferes with their right to maximise profit, they can sue, as they have been doing under existing agreements in a whole range of highly controversial cases.

The other point I want to highlight, because it is sometimes lost in all of the justified focus on ISDS, is the question of regulatory co-operation. This is the back door by which they will agree GMOs, chlorine washed chickens and hormone fed beef. They will not sign up for it in the first instance but it is a living agreement. They set up a regulatory co-operation council, which is populated by so-called experts who are representatives of the big corporations and, from then on, they get a first say in the writing of laws. It is giving corporations the right to write laws on things that affect the rest of us. This must be a key issue in the election. People should not vote for any political party that refuses to take a clear stand against TTIP.

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