Ireland will be asking the Trump administration to lift trade tariffs on whiskey, medical devices and certain agricultural products, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Helen McEntee has said.
US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick and trade envoy Jamieson Greer are in Brussels to meet trade ministers from the EU’s 27 states on Monday, with European governments making ]their cases for import tariffs to be eased on a range of products and goods.
Nearly four months after a tariff deal was agreed between US president Donald Trump and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, progress securing carve outs to the across-the-board import taxes on goods sold to the US has been slow.
European negotiators will use the opportunity with Mr Lutnick and Mr Greer to ask for a range of products to be exempted from 15 per cent tariffs that have applied to all imports coming from the EU. Goods on the EU’s wish list include pasta, cheese, wines, whiskey and olive oil.
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Speaking before the meeting on Monday, Ms McEntee said the Government would be pushing for key Irish industries to benefit from any possible tariff cut.
“Ireland will be working hard, and we’ll be making the case, as I will be today, to make sure that medtech is very much part of that, to make sure that our whiskey industry and our agri food industry is part of that as well,” Ms McEntee said.
The EU agreed to stomach tariffs of 15 per cent to prevent a fight with the Trump administration that many believed could have escalated into a hugely damaging trade war.
Tariffs on pharmaceuticals, which account for a huge chunk of Irish transatlantic exports, would be capped at that 15 per cent rate. Despite repeated threats, Mr Trump has yet to levy tariffs on pharma products yet.
As part of the one-sided tariff deal, the EU did secure commitments that certain products, such as aircraft, aircraft parts, generic pharmaceuticals and cork products, would be exempt from import levies.
The European Commission, the EU’s executive branch which represents the bloc in the trade talks, has been seeking to extend those tariff exemptions to cover a much broader range of goods and industries.
“Our American friends are very much aware of where the European Union would like to see tariff reductions, or other changes,” one EU diplomat said in recent days.
The meeting between the senior Trump administration officials and EU trade ministers was arranged to give both sides a better understanding of where the other was coming from. The discussion will take place over lunch, where the two sides will also cover steeper 50 per cent tariffs on steel imports, and their approach to China.
Ms McEntee said at the time the EU-US tariff agreement was struck that it was clear there would be “space for further discussions on further areas of common interest”.
The Government continued to stress pharmaceutical companies’ complex, interconnected supply chains were vital to what was an “important two way industry for both the US and the EU”, she said.
