AN TAOISEACH Micheál Martin said that the Government’s ‘over-arching priority’ was to protect Irish jobs amid ongoing concerns about the United States’ implementation of tariffs. The pharmaceutical industry, in particular, faces an uncertain future in terms of its presence in Ireland.
Speaking at an event in Limerick, the Taoiseach said that ‘tariffs are bad for the world economy and a trade war will be very bad for the world economy’.
Mr Martin’s comments come in the wake of an announcement by US President Donald Trump that there would be new tariffs on pharmaceuticals. Mr Trump said that his ultimate goal was to bring pharmaceutical production back to the US.
In response to questions about where this leaves the pharmaceutical industry in Ireland, the Taoiseach told reporters: “I think we have to take this step by step, [pharmaceutical firms] are long-standing and embedded, and are producing high quality and essential medicines, so you just can’t dismantle that overnight.
“Our objective is to engage with a view to working through this, and the overarching priority is the protection of jobs and the protection and maintenance of facilities in Ireland. But it is serious, this is a fundamental change in terms of economic policy.
“If you look through from the late 1990s and 2000s onwards, we were in an era of globalisation. We’re now moving into an era of potential protectionism and tariffs and retaliatory tariffs, that’s not good for anybody.”
Mr Martin said said that now was the time to start thinking about Ireland’s indigenous businesses, ‘copper-fastening existing relationships’ with other countries in the EU as well as other tariff-threatened countries like Canada, and ‘expanding the single market’.
Yesterday evening, Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe said that he was ‘extremely concerned’ about the potential impact of US tariffs on pharmaceutical exports. Mr Donohoe said that the Government was preparing for ‘real and significant’ complications if the US decided to follow through on the imposition of tariffs.
“I want to underline the scale of the change that we might have to deal with, the various significant and real difficulties that could present for our economy,” he said. “I believe that collectively, we will be able to rise to the test. I’m not going to deny for a moment, there will be challenges. It’s going to be so difficult, but that’s where our focus and our work will now begin.”
