It is not often we hear Senators complimenting previous colleagues here. It was so nice to hear Senator Scahill thank Aisling Dolan for the work she did here in the Seanad. I commend him on that.

Only last week, the Canadian Prime Minister made waves by declaring that the old rules-based world order is dead and is not coming back, saying that it was always partially false and that we should not mourn it. As a confirmed liberal who has been the target of Trump's anger, Carney's speech is sobering and should be read as a serious warning and wake-up call to us in Europe and Ireland.

Instead, we are seeing Ursula von der Leyen gleefully heralding a new trade agreement with India which will see the elimination of up to 90% of all tariffs between the EU and that nation. In other words, the EU keeps pushing a 20-year-old globalist trade agenda for a world which no longer exists, trying to trump hard power with trade deals. Worse still, our own Government seems content to go blindly along with this agenda instead of taking the path of hard-nosed realism and working to shore up our own economic independence and autonomy.

The risk of the race to the bottom created by this deal cannot be overstated. We are opening our customs union to a nation where the average salary of its 1.4 billion people is €350 a month. Likewise with the proposal to increase labour mobility with India. While I know many Indians in my own constituency and community who are hardworking, contributing men and women, economic sanity dictates we cannot throw our borders open to less developed nations of such scale without endangering domestic labour. It is the same with the Mercosur deal. There is no way our farmers can compete fairly with South America, where there are industrial ranches the size of County Laois. Yet, our Government stayed silent until the last minute instead of signalling opposition from day one, wasting both our own credibility and our real opportunity to stop the deal. We are at a pivotal moment in history, with many vital decisions before us in the coming months, and we must seriously switch on to defend our national interests.