It would be “foolish” to not prepare for a scenario where tariffs on trade announced by US President Donald Trump remained in place long term, Tánaiste Simon Harris has said. The Fine Gael leader said following the “chaos” of the last fortnight, there were signs the US was more open to negotiate. After sending the financial markets into a tailspin, Mr Trump partially scaled back import levies he had hiked on practically all goods sold into the US from other countries, as part of a 90-day “pause”. Products sold from the European Union (EU) to the US will be charged a 10 per cent tariff, rather than a 20 per cent rate Mr Trump had initially suggested. Higher 25 per cent tariffs, which are effectively taxes to import goods, will remain in place on steel, aluminium, automobiles and car parts sold into the US from abroad. Speaking in Cork earlier on Monday, Taoiseach Micheál Martin said: “This whole issue (tariffs) has been evolving – there has been a lot of uncertainty and our challenge is not to comment on every single event of every single day or every announcement but I welcome the fact that there is a 90 day pause although there is a still 10 per cent tariff and remaining tariffs on automotives and aluminium.” [ Chinese exports surge ahead of Trump’s 145% tariff on goodsOpens in new window ] “But there is an opportunity now for negotiation and I would hope that within that opportunity that the sectoral issues in pharma and also in semiconductors would form part of that.” European commissioner Maroš Šefčovič, who has been leading the EU’s efforts to negotiate with the US administration, is in Washington DC to meet commerce secretary Howard Lutnick on Monday. Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Simon Harris said it would be “foolish not to prepare for an environment in which tariffs persist”. While he said the Government was “preparing for the worst”, it was also pushing for a EU-US deal that would see Mr Trump suspend tariffs he had raised since returning to office. “When I was in [Washington] DC only a couple of days ago, I got the very clear impression that negotiation was something that the United States was now very interested in,” Mr Harris said. “The European Union position and the Irish position has been clear from the start, that we wanted talks ahead of tariffs. The US decided to put tariffs ahead of talks. We saw the turmoil and the chaos that that caused,” he said. “After the moments of chaos and the big reveal and all the press conferences, it’s now time to get serious, it’s time to get down to business,” he said. Mr Harris was speaking in Luxembourg, where he was attending a meeting of EU foreign ministers on Monday. The 90-day pause on the higher rates of blanket tariffs kicking in was not “perfect”, given European businesses would still have to pay 10 per cent import levies to sell products in the US, Mr Harris said. There needed to be a big push to strike a deal in that 90-day window, he said. “It’s important that every hour of every day now is put to good use, because we’ve seen the turmoil of the last number of days and that simply can’t continue,” he said. In response to Mr Trump temporarily scaling back US tariffs on global trade, the EU delayed its own package of counter-tariffs, which it had been about to put on imports of US soybeans, oranges, steel and other products.