Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

There is nothing to recommend TTIP, the Trade in Services Agreement, TISA, the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement, CETA, the EU-Singapore Free Trade Agreement or any of these so-called free trade treaties. They are nothing more than the next phase in the corporate takeover of economic life with a very serious consequence for democracy, essentially bypassing and subverting normal democracy.

By way of background to this, it is worth referring to the presence today of the Taoiseach in the luxury Swiss resort of Davos, where he is hobnobbing with the world’s billionaires and the CEOs of the world’s richest companies. If they bothered to pay tax, we might have less global poverty and homelessness, less of a housing crisis and we might have the resources we need for our infrastructure and our public services. However, because of these greedy oligarchs, whose greed seems to know no bounds and whose level of wealth and earnings is obscene in the extreme, our public services and infrastructure are chronically under-resourced.

These people do not believe in paying taxes and their greed for profit is boundless, to the point that the 65 richest individuals in the world own more wealth between them than the poorest 50% of the world's population. It is shocking and obscene. Today, in Davos, the Taoiseach is sucking up to those greedy people. Instead of asking corporation representatives why they do not pay their taxes, the Taoiseach is sucking up to these oligarchs and tax dodgers, and is facilitating, as are other EU leaders, the sort of agreements that will further advance the control the multinationals have over our economic life, public services and infrastructure.

TTIP is nothing to do with increasing trade. Tariffs between the US and Europe are already very low, and more serious estimates of the trade increase that will result from TTIP put it at approximately 0.1%, which is negligible. As the proponents of TTIP admit, it is about removing what they call barriers. They are worried about barriers to the advance of the multinational corporations, particularly to grab control of public services, areas from which they have been excluded due to public provision. This is where it relates directly to homelessness and our housing and health service crises. Multinationals want to move into those areas and take over. They want to expand private healthcare in order to make money from it and grab control of the housing market, and our Government is facilitating it with such agreements.

The ISDS mechanism will be the means by which democratically elected governments representing the people will be unable to prevent the privatisation of services, defend the collective-bargaining rights of trade unions, enforce proper health and safety regarding food or protect the environment, among a range of other issues. It relates to issues such as water. Recently, as a result of an ISDS-style court decision, the Argentine Government was required to pay €405 million in compensation to water giant Suez because it had reversed the privatisation of the Buenos Aires water utility after the corporation sought a 60% increase in water charges.

Does this start to ring some warning bells about what is happening here and with regard to Government assurances that we will prevent our water services from being privatised? No. Once these agreements have been implemented, we will not have the right to protect our water services from privatisation. Multinational giants, which are already privatising Irish Water through the back door, will be able to simply tell Governments they are not allowed to subsidise water services or infrastructure or keep the corporations out of the market for water, health, education or housing. It will not be allowed. TTIP will destroy jobs, small and medium enterprise, environmental protection, labour rights and trade union rights. We must oppose it, root and branch.

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