Diolch, Cadeirydd. I’m delighted to follow Simon Thomas, whose speeches are always informative and interesting, and today’s has been no exception. I warmly endorse what he said about the opportunity for free ports that leaving the customs union will give us.

I’m grateful to Eluned Morgan not just for the extra publicity by mentioning my name in her speech, but also for bringing the position of the Irish republic to the forefront of this debate. This is an excellent report from the committee, I think, because it’s very fair and balanced, but it draws attention to some potentially serious transitional problems arising out of Britain’s decision to leave the EU. I commend David Rees, as the Chairman of the committee, for being a model of partisan impartiality, if I can put it that way, and having made a real contribution to this debate more widely. Because, if there is no deal with the EU, this is a very serious matter for the Irish republic as well for Wales—much more serious, perhaps, for the Irish republic, than it is for us, because 50 per cent of Irish exports come to Britain. Ninety per cent of Ireland’s oil and gas comes from Britain, through Milford Haven, very largely. Fifteen billion pounds’ worth of goods are exported to the UK. Half of the Irish republic’s beef exports come to Britain, and 42 per cent of all its food and drink exports. Fifty per cent of Irish hauliers serve European continental countries through the land bridge with the United Kingdom, and 30 per cent of that traffic is refrigerated. So, given the time delays that would inevitably be the consequence of trying to re-route from the existing ports that are being used, then there are very serious downside risks for the Irish republic, which makes it perhaps all the more surprising that the European Commission is being quite so intransigent in these negotiations. Are the Irish going to fare any better than the Greeks in the minds of the European Commission, Monsieur Barnier and Monsieur Juncker and their colleagues?

I’ve never actually been under any illusion about these negotiations because the EU, having been from its inception a political project, not an economic one, despite the fact it was originally called the European Economic Community—what is obviously uppermost in the minds of the negotiators for the EU is the ultimate destination, which they see, of a federal states of Europe, which certainly nobody in Britain ever signed up to, and nobody was ever asked in any other part of Europe. For them, small countries are a small price to pay for the achievement of their grand continental political objectives. So, I think that the Government is to be deprecated, actually, for not going into these negotiations expecting to fail, and therefore having wasted the last nine months or a year or so when it could have been making preparations to deal with the very severe practical problems that have been referred to in this debate, and which do certainly need now to be accelerated—or the solutions, if there is no deal, need to be accelerated—over the course of the next few months.

I do think that the technological advances that were referred to by Mark Isherwood in his speech offer a partial solution to the problem, and certainly mitigate the difficulties that will arise, and the experience of other countries, whether it be Canada, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden—Germany, indeed, has similar arrangements through these authorised economic operator systems, which are mentioned in the report. But I personally think that there is every reason to believe that, if the member states of the European Union are prepared to put pressure upon the Commission, a deal might be forged. What has always amazed me is how supine the member states are when faced with the drive towards federal union from the Commission when it threatens their own domestic national interests—in some cases, in the case of southern European countries, very, very dramatically indeed. I don’t want to see the Irish republic suffer from Brexit any more than I want to see Britain suffer from Brexit. We should have the closest possible connections with our geographical neighbours, not least because of the need to maintain the peace process in Northern Ireland. I think it would be criminal if the European Union were, by its intransigence, to put all that at risk, but that is certainly a possibility.

I do believe that this report offers the way forward in practical terms to deal with these problems, and I look forward to hearing the Cabinet Secretary’s enlightenment on the various questions that it poses for him and on the criticisms that were made in the report.