A Call To Action: 6.30pm, Tuesday 1^st March, 2016, in Wigwam, 54 Middle Abbey St, Dublin 1. All welcome. CETA is just as bad as TTIP and it may be law by mid-May.

From 22^nd to 24^th February in Brussels, activists and campaigners from national campaigns, NGOs, trade unions, consumer and farmers’ groups will come together to learn more about TTIP and CETA and to plan future common actions and research. Representatives from Uplift.ie and Friends of the Earth (Ireland) who are attending the Brussels meeting, will report back to us on March 1^st, how the meeting in Brussels went, what they learned about CETA & TTIP and what the plans are for pan-European action to defend democracy, public services and workers’ rights, and to defeat these free-investment ‘trade’ deals.

The Brussels anti-TTIP & CETA meeting is hosted by the European ATTAC Network, the European Digital Rights Initiative, the Seattle2Brussels Network, the Transport & Environment group (part of the European Environmental Bureau), and STOP TTIP! (the collective that collected 3.4 million signatures so far against TTIP and CETA).

The report-back meeting in Wigwam is an opportunity to also hear from the Irish civil society groups who are already part of the TTIP Information Network and to welcome new members: so do come along if your group is progressive and interested in working with us. Recently joined member organisations include the National Women’s Council of Ireland, and the Irish  Food Writers Guild (read here a statement against TTIP by Guild member, Darina Allen, on behalf of Slow Food Ireland).

If accepted, the EU-Canada free investment ‘trade’ deal, called CETA, will force the privatisation of public services including water. Only ‘non-economic’ services such as street lighting would be protected from the ‘free’ market. The text of CETA is available here. The Irish Government could have included water, health and education in the ‘negative list’ of CETA and excluded them from privatisation; however, they chose  not to.

Sense of Urgency: May 13^th CETA VOTE

On May 13th the EU Council of Ministers plan to vote on CETA. If 16 of the 28 foreign affairs ministers of the EU, representing 65% of the EU population vote yes for CETA at that meeting, then CETA will apply fully in international law for a minimum of three years. The EU Commission wrote that three-year ‘provisional application’ clause into the deal in case the European Parliament subsequently votes to reject CETA. The only thing stopping CETA from permanent adoption is the European Parliament.

CETA = ISDS = end of democracy

CETA would allow foreign corporations to bypass Irish and EU courts to sue governments in a private arbitration called ISDS for all their imagined lost unearned future profits which they feel comes about as a result of our laws and regulations which are designed to keep food standards high, to protect the environment, maintain or improve good public services and to defend workers’ rights. So for example, if we refuse to sell them our public water system, they could sue us for all their imagined lost unearned future profits. It’s not just Irish, European and TransAtlantic civil society that are out to defend our democracy and defeat ISDS, but respected professors of law from prestigious universities around world, and the United Nations’ ‘Conference on Trade and Development’, as well as the Association of German Judges.

Call to action!

The meeting in Wigwam is designed to not only raise awareness about the implications of TTIP, and particularly CETA, but also to invigorate our Irish end of the democracy movement to defeat these free-investment deals and to discuss actions to stop CETA: protests, online activity, local authority TTIP-Free Zones, public meetings and debates, workshops, artists against TTIP, etc, etc …

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For more info, please contact: ttipinfonetwork@gmail.com