John Davis

The European Parliament is still thinking about this and looking at it and ultimately will need to endorse that because we've had so many other moving parts in terms of the U.F.

tariff situation, particularly with Supreme Court ruling impacting on the tariff arrangements.

So the key message from business was,

Europe, advance your competitiveness agenda, get serious about your effective regulation, and let's have certainty in terms of a trade deal.

And, well, there's bits of that trade deal, you know, as Irish business, we don't particularly like.

We'd rather have no tariffs.

But having the certainty and that ability to plan is the best outcome for Europe at present.

Yeah, so I suppose we get to sit in the chair of a lot of really important conversations.

Europe will get to, or Ireland will get to manage the flow of a lot of these files in terms of setting the agenda, in terms of getting things advanced.

From a Brussels perspective, we're coming at quite an important time, David, because we're coming out of Cypriot presidency that's been disrupted because Europe is now at war on two fronts, right?

So to speak, from a European business perspective, we feel that in terms of cyber threats, cyber attacks, it doesn't manifest itself on two-fronted military war.

Obviously, we have a war in Ukraine and with the Middle East now, we have the advent of more cyber attacks.

The Cypriot presidency has been disrupted.

And then when we come out of the Irish presidency, we go to the Lithuanian presidency.

So I think it's a lot of people in Brussels looking at the Irish presidency saying, this is going to be a really important six months in terms of advancing key files.

And Ireland has that track record in terms of being very successful in terms of dealing with tricky issues.

Previously, in terms of enlargement of the European Union, some really effective presidency work about financial budgeting and the multi-annual financial frameworks in Europe.

These are tricky.

When you're talking about money, they're always tricky negotiations, right?

Yeah, absolutely.