{"id":313609,"date":"2026-02-23T21:26:14","date_gmt":"2026-02-23T21:26:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/313609\/"},"modified":"2026-02-23T21:26:14","modified_gmt":"2026-02-23T21:26:14","slug":"european-parliament-pauses-work-ratifying-eu-us-tariff-deal-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/313609\/","title":{"rendered":"European Parliament pauses work ratifying EU-US tariff deal \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Work to remove long-standing tariffs on American industrial goods has been paused by the European Parliament, while Brussels waits to see exactly how US president Donald Trump plans<\/a> to rework his tariff<\/a> agenda. <\/p>\n

The commitment to remove mostly low, pre-Trump tariffs on a range of United States industrial imports was an important aspect of the European Union-US agreement struck last year. <\/p>\n

The US supreme court <\/a>ruled Trump had exceeded his authority when relying on an emergency law to impose sweeping \u201cliberation day\u201d tariffs on countries worldwide. <\/p>\n

The ruling was a significant blow to the US president\u2019s ability to leverage threats of economic pain to get his way in trade and foreign policy negotiations. <\/p>\n

In response to the legal defeat, Trump said he would invoke a separate, untested law to temporarily introduce a global 15 per cent tariff on imports. <\/p>\n

European politicians and officials spent the weekend trying to confirm what the developments mean for a EU-US trade deal struck last summer, which capped tariffs on European Union goods sold into the US at 15 per cent. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Trump\u2019s new tariffs: What do we know now?Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

The Government is nervous about losing the relative stability that the lopsided deal brought to the transatlantic trading relationship. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s so important for business that we have that predictability, that we have that certainty and that we don\u2019t regress after a significant amount of work and time and effort has gone into reaching the agreement,\u201d said Minister for Trade Helen McEntee<\/a> on Monday. \u201cWe need absolute clarity.\u201d <\/p>\n

The European Parliament\u2019s trade committee has paused its work on ratifying the EU-US tariff deal until the dust settles on the latest twist. <\/p>\n

\"\"Could Simon Harris\u2019s savings scheme for the \u2018middle classes\u2019 prove to be a sound investment?<\/p>\n

Bernd Lange, chairman of the parliament\u2019s trade committee, said the EU was \u201csticking to the deal\u201d, but any vote by MEPs would be pushed back. The implications of the US supreme court decision \u201ccannot be ignored,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

The senior German MEP said the key legal tool used by the US to underpin its tariffs had been struck down. <\/p>\n

Lange said the way in which the US intended to replace it with a global tariff rate would lead to taxes on EU imports \u201cexceeding\u201d the 15 per cent cap agreed. <\/p>\n

The parliament\u2019s work to approve commitments made by Brussels in the deal would be \u201cput on hold\u201d until the US could provide legal certainty, he said. <\/p>\n

The deal negotiated between Brussels and Washington meant tariffs levied on future EU trade were set at 15 per cent, with the exception of steel and aluminium, which face much higher import taxes of 50 per cent. <\/p>\n

Tariffs on those sectors are based on separate national security grounds, so they remain unaffected by the US court ruling.<\/p>\n

A separate national security inquiry \u2013 known as a 232 investigation \u2013 was launched to tee up possible tariffs on pharma imports. However, the White House never followed through on those threats. The EU-US deal also excluded aircraft and some chemicals from the levies. <\/p>\n

Tariffs on pharmaceuticals would be particularly damaging for the Republic. Several US multinational pharma firms with large manufacturing bases in the State, such as Eli Lilly, Pfizer, MSD, Johnson & Johnson and others, account for a sizeable portion of all Irish exports across the Atlantic. <\/p>\n

The European Commission, the EU\u2019s executive arm that leads on trade policy, wants assurances that any US global tariff will not be stacked on top of the existing rate agreed in the EU-US deal. <\/p>\n

Speaking to broadcaster CBS at the weekend, US trade representative Jamieson Greer said the Trump administration would \u201cstand by\u201d the various tariff deals it had negotiated with other countries. <\/p>\n

\u201cI would take that to mean there will be no stacking of tariffs, that there will be no changes to what was agreed last year,\u201d said McEntee. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe need President Trump to be very clear as to what he is going to do next,\u201d added the Fine Gael Minister. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Work to remove long-standing tariffs on American industrial goods has been paused by the European Parliament, while Brussels…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":313610,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[72,969,113,5148,1556,61,60,32643,73421,1963],"class_list":["post-313609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-donald-trump","tag-economy","tag-european-union","tag-helen-mcentee","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-jamieson-greer","tag-us-supreme-court","tag-us-tariffs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313609\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/313610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}