What Mick spoke about.

Madam President, when we talk about EU enlargement, including Ukrainian accession, the people of Europe and especially Ireland should be aware of exactly what it will mean. The cost of Ukrainian accession will be monumental. It will cost trillions to rebuild Ukraine, not the EUR 50 billion. That’s before we talk about the actual cost of enlargement. Ukraine and Moldova are three times poorer than

Mr President, ordinary people across Europe are on their knees with the cost of living crisis. The La Hulpe Declaration is more empty rhetoric to these people. The social market economy has failed them. Again and again, the market is prioritised at the expense of the social. Paragraph 36 of the Declaration deals specifically with housing. With every month that currently passes, Ireland reaches ano

Mr President, the EU proposals for an Anti-Money Laundering Regulation need further scrutiny and should not be adopted. The regulation proposes an EU-wide limit for cash payments in commercial transactions to be set at EUR 10 000. Commissioner, you said the proposed measures would mean that funeral services above EUR 10 000 would have to be paid for through card or via a bank. A lot of people I kn

Mr President, this place struggles to utter the truth about who bombed who first. Israel bombed Iran first. But this place has an imperialist worldview. How did you come to hate the people of the Middle East so much that you try to exclude them from the realm of international law? Over the past five years, EU countries have been complicit – through arms sales and direct military involvement – in t

Madam President, it has to be said the EU has some neck lecturing Georgia on rule of law when we’re sending weapons into a genocide and German police are cracking down on civil society like 1930s Nazi Germany. Transparency International has called for sanctions against Georgia to defend democracy. They couldn’t care less about Georgian democracy; they care about the money they get paid to interfer

Madam President, (start of speech off mic) ... will only contribute to further lawlessness and a complete breakdown of multilateralism. Perhaps that’s the point. It looks like the US would rather burn the world to the ground than see the end of their dominance over it. Even the IMF and Christine Lagarde have warned that the US bank proposals to use the frozen assets to finance the war risked break

Madam President, over six months and more than 100 000 casualties in Gaza, and now you want to talk about an EU response. The EU response is to funnel weapons to the genocidal apartheid regime, provide diplomatic cover for their crimes and cry crocodile tears for the massacred children while defending and occupying powers non-existent right to attack the people of the land they occupied. With Russ

Mr President, last October, Commission President von der Leyen told us Israel has a right to self-defence in line with international law. That’s not true. Occupying powers have no right to attack those who resist occupation. Also, fiction is the notion that von der Leyen, the EU or the US give a damn about international law. Israel bombed an embassy in a third country, and the Brits and the US and

Madam President, unfortunately, the EU’s continued complicity has rendered the aims of this directive meaningless. Time and time again, the EU has fed the poverty, conflict and unemployment, which the EU itself names as the root causes of trafficking. Within just four months in 2022, the EU countries reported over 80 suspected trafficking cases of Ukrainian refugees. Two years later, Parliament is

Madam President, the EU pretends to care about forced labour, but methinks the EU would implode if it had to stop exploiting, immiserating and shortening lives in the Global South. The record of Western capitalism is one of genocide, colonialism and exploitation. We crushed the new democracies that came out of the post-war decolonisation period. We assassinated democratically elected leaders who s

Madam President, if we were to truly make repair available to everyone, it needs to be affordable, accessible and mainstream and protected from monopoly practices. The text of the provisional agreement goes a long way to addressing this concern. Manufacturers will be obliged to provide information on spare parts on their websites, and to make those spare parts available to all parties in the repai

Madam President, there’s much that’s welcome in this regulation to tackle pollution from plastic pellet losses, but in truth, we could be doing more. The regulation should include all pre-production plastic powder forms, powders, dust and flakes. It should also apply to all operators. Article 1 exempts operators handling quantities lower than five tonnes per year, and creates reduced requirements

Madam President, on 1 April, Israel made an unprovoked attack against the Iranian diplomatic premises in Damascus, violating the sovereignty of two countries, as well as violating the UN Charter and the Vienna Conventions. It killed 16 people, including civilians. Where was the condemnation from von der Leyen? Iran retaliates, claiming self-defence. The logic Ursula von der Leyen vehemently suppor

Madam President, it’s soul destroying that this House still hasn’t wanted a resolution on Gaza on the ICJ ruling. Whatever happened to our respect for international law? We’ve had six months of Israeli genocide in Gaza, over six months, and we are still to condemn it. We want the resolution added to the Gaza debate, and that we also include reference to the International Court of Justice order and

Mr President, how on earth can you still maintain that UNRWA should be defunded in the middle of a genocide, where famine has been used as a weapon of destruction? There is zero evidence about the Israeli claims. UNRWA is the central agency providing a lifeline of support in Gaza. Israel’s completely unsubstantiated claims about connections with Hamas were a disgusting attempt to both distract fro

Mr President, Parliament should not approve the discharge for the Commission. Yes, this is a discharge for 2022 accounts. But the outrageous behaviour of the Commission President in 2023, in particular, calls into question all other yearly accounts during her mandate. In October, the Commission projected the Israeli flag on the side of the Commission headquarters. As Israel began its genocidal ass

Mr President, Ursula von der Leyen has repeatedly said that Israel’s values are the EU’s values. Long before it engaged in its genocidal attempt to obliterate Gaza, Israel had turned Gaza into an open-air prison. The Asylum and Migration Pact will further consolidate, encourage and facilitate the warehousing of asylum seekers. The so-called solidarity mechanism allows Member States to pay into a f

Mr President, last night we hosted a packed event in Parliament where the UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, presented her UN report, ‘Anatomy of a Genocide’, a report that everybody should read. Analysing Israel’s patterns of violence since 8 October, Albanese concludes that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide has been met and that Israel has committed three acts of g

Madam President, we talk a lot in the EU about human rights, EU values, defending democracy from the threat of authoritarianism. Meanwhile, the Commission President and the right wing are doing deals with the likes of Tunisia to outsource the EU borders to repressive dictatorships. Hardly surprising, given von der Leyen’s support for the genocides in Gaza by the fascist Israeli regime. It seriousl

Madam President, cohesion policy funds are intended to encourage even development in the EU, including regional development. Ireland has obviously received significant cohesion funding, but it is not clear these funds reach all those areas in need. Cape Clear Island off the coast of Cork is a place of beauty, but the long-term survival of life on the island, its culture and heritage are at risk. T

Madam President, the idea of creating a designated capital for children, if it were to focus on children and how we mind them and how we treat them, it would be certainly be a positive. In Dublin today, in our home city, they reckon that almost 1 in 5 children are at risk of poverty. Now, Ireland is deemed a very wealthy country, and you’d wonder how, in God’s name, that could be the case. Well, s

Madam President, not everybody can afford a healthy lifestyle, but the State can certainly help. The EU has a GDP of almost EUR 20 trillion at the moment, and there’s more wealth in circulation throughout the Union than there’s ever been since its inception. In my own country, Ireland, tax receipts for 2023 totalled EUR 88 billion – the highest figure ever recorded – with corporation tax amounting

Madam President, all artefacts, national treasures and artworks stolen or plundered by countries throughout history should be returned, and Russia should return the Romanian national treasure. But in here we seldom apply the same level of scrutiny to our own Member States. Take France, for example. The French have engaged in two of the worst cases of plundering of artwork in the last 500 years: fi

Mr President, reading the Afghan resolution beside the Gaza one, it’s hard to believe that the two were negotiated by the same Parliament. The Taliban is condemned for their treatment of women and girls, and rightly so. The resolution says they’re to be held accountable for their crimes. Sanctions must be imposed. Meanwhile, in the genocide of Gaza, only Hamas are condemned. Humanitarian aid has b

Madam President, with this semester document, the EU has missed a golden opportunity to reform its own fiscal rules. The deal, struck in December 2023, maintains the Maastricht Treaty’s 60 % debt and 3 % deficit ceilings, and this, I think, is a mistake. Take, for example, how the current fiscal rules work in Belgium. To comply with the current rules, the Belgian Government will have to save EUR 4