What Barry spoke about.

Mr President, this debate is not actually about EU regulation; it is about global governance, and it's about the EU leading a debate in this Hemicycle on global governance. The title of the debate is very explicit about this. Governance and innovation do not have to run against each other. Governance can point innovation in a human-centred way. I also think that the analogy drawn by many speakers

I want to ask you about Christian social thinking. As far as I understand it, the Pope has made some very clear comments about climate justice in his encyclical Laudato Si'. He's also spoken about the rights of migrants and refugees. He's also spoken about the necessity of governance around AI. How do you reconcile your party and your statements on all of these issues with the clear thinking of th

Madam President, colleagues, we are told that the EU will do all it can: take all necessary steps to defend the ICC – but not yet. What are we waiting for? Already US sanctions are affecting ICC judges. We hosted Kimberly Prost, a Canadian judge of the ICC, who was on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Already, she cannot do basic services online, she cannot do any bank

I think it's well known that there have been difficult relations between the UK and the European Union. We now have in place – and have for a couple of years – a Prime Minister who is, I think, much more prepared to understand the common challenge that we in the European Union and the UK face in terms of Russian aggression in Ukraine and across the world. I really hope that there will also be a co

Madam President, Commissioner, Minister Byrne, the UK is a crucial ally, as many speakers have already said, in these extraordinary times. Trump, Xi and Putin might form a troika of illiberalism standing in defiance of the achievements of liberal democracy. How do we react? Certainly not by treating the United Kingdom like any other third country. Rather, we need to rise to the challenge that was

Madam President, Commissioner Síkela and colleagues, it's great that we're having this debate on an ambitious global health policy. We do global health because it's the right thing to do. We do global health because there have been extraordinary gains in, for example, child mortality in the last decades. So it works. It actually works. And that's why it's important that we resurface the assumption

Mr President, High Representative, Israel is making Palestinian life in the West Bank completely unviable. Cutting off water for businesses, ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem, widespread settler violence and the bulldozing of Palestinian villages – the list goes on. It is a suffocation of Palestinian life. But what would it mean to put an end to Palestinians right to self-determination? A one-sta

Madam President, Donald Trump has decided to get involved in the debate on the united Ireland. What could possibly go wrong? As Claire Hanna memorably said, he is perhaps 'not as orange as he looks'. However, people who think seriously about Ireland's future don't take seriously Trump's comments. Maybe it was a way of getting back at Andy Burnham, who bizarrely announced that a provision of the Be

Madam President, climate policy is not ideology. It is science. Science makes the microphone work, it keeps the lights on and it concludes that warming is anthropogenic. Warming is caused by human activity. To have to explain that to assert this in an adult parliament is frankly depressing. It is difficult to listen to conservatives criticising emissions trading when it was them that insisted on a

Madam President, Commissioner and colleagues, I just want to talk about the debate we've been having about China. I was on the trade committee in the last mandate, and we put an awful lot of effort into developing a whole raft of trade defence instruments around anti-dumping, FDI screening, the procurement instrument and anti‑coercion, among a range of other things. And we appointed a chief trade

Madam President, High Representative, back in May at the last plenary, you and I – you might recall – had a brief exchange about the problem of the mislabelling of settlement goods. And I raised the question with you as to what the EU customs authorities could do about the fact that so many settlement goods are presented as 'made in Israel'? You replied that exports from Israel are difficult to pr

Mr President, Commissioner and colleagues, every day we see headlines referring to the AI race. And one thing is clear to me: European AI companies are not the frontrunners. US companies have developed 40 advanced AI systems. China comes in second with 15. In Europe we have only developed three. This is despite a combined EU GDP of EUR 18 trillion alongside brilliant universities and research inst

Mr President, High Representative and colleagues, the UN Security Council was supposed to be a guarantor of global peace. Instead, its ineffectiveness has emboldened lawlessness and accelerated impunity. On my way here this morning on the tram, one of the stops was named after Aristide Briand, who in 1926, a hundred years ago, won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on international peace. And I wo

I understand all the points you have made about trade and the Member States, and I think everybody will continue to campaign for a suspension of the association. But in the meantime, we can actually implement the existing law. As you know, settlement goods are treated differently to goods that are made in Israel. They are subject of a tariff. I asked the EU delegation in Palestine to estimate the

Mr President, according to a recent UN report, sexual assault is 'a major element' and 'standard operating procedure' in the ill-treatment of Palestinians in Israeli prisons by settlers and the IDF. This is borne out in separate reports on sexual violence by B'Tselem, by Breaking the Silence, by the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor and by the Norwegian Refugee Council. Last Monday, The New York Times

Mr President, last month I visited Beirut and spoke to people who had left south Lebanon for their own safety. They showed me photos of their homes, of their fields and their villages, concluding in many cases that they would not be returning. Since then, the demolition of buildings has continued with relentless ferocity. And then came 8 April 2026, when the US and Iran agreed a ceasefire that off

Madam President, Commissioner and colleagues, the Lobito railway corridor is perhaps the best known Global Gateway flagship project. However, a press release from one of the operators of the railway last month disclosed some of the shortcomings of the Global Gateway project that this opinion seeks to address. The press release announced the transport by railway of low-carbon copper anodes to the E

Madam President, Commissioner and colleagues, I very much welcome the plan arrived at at the North Sea Summit to dramatically ramp up renewable energy in the North Sea with joint European projects and the plans around increased generation in the time frame. I think this can provide a pathway to cost-sharing for the rest of Europe and, indeed, for the highlighted energy pathways, and I think the po

Mr President, colleagues, here are 10 ways in which the United States has undermined international law in the last 12 months: rolling out the red carpet for war criminal Putin in Alaska; endless support for Netanyahu's war crimes; withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement; withdrawal from the WHO and UNHRC; the closure of USAID; the illegal global tariffs; sanctions on the International Criminal

Mr President, Commissioner and colleagues, we keep hearing about existential threats to the European Union, that the European Union is on the verge of collapse. This is a narrative that we regularly hear from the far right, who would love nothing better than for the European Union to come to an end. So someone needs to explain to me, and indeed to the far right, why so many countries are striving

Mr President, Commissioner, when you presented this package, already the situation was urgent. The events of the last 10 days supercharged the urgency of what we are debating here in this Chamber today. We need to really face up to the unavoidable nature of that urgency right now. In my own country, in Ireland, we have extraordinary vulnerabilities. We rely 80 % on fossil fuels for energy consumpt

Madam President, Commissioner and colleagues, Chancellor Merz and Prime Minister Meloni were happy to point out the recent IMF report conclusion that we, in fact, impose a 110 % tariff equivalent on ourselves by not completing the single market for services. We are, in effect, sanctioning ourselves. But what Merz and Meloni failed to quote was the same IMF report which concludes that the particula

Mr President, Commissioner, colleagues, the agreement of March 2025 between the Kurds, the SDF and the government promised some hope for the future. However, that is looking increasingly fragile. The blundering attempts by President Trump are no match for the staying power of the European Union, and I believe that the Union has a really critical role now, providing its credibility and its long-ter

Mr President, Commissioner, colleagues, I very much agree with the sentiments of this report and the statements of other MEPs on the effect the extraordinary changes in drone technology have had on security and defence policy, but also on wider industry. Our own capacity here in the European Union is being constantly tested: at least 10 countries have detected drones near airports and military uni

Mr President, High Representative and colleagues, I want to also express my solidarity with the people of Greenland for the stress that they are experiencing. I want to acknowledge the calm resolution of our Danish MEPs, with one notable exception, standing in the face of the extraordinary intimidation and threats that they are receiving from the United States with their barely believable and tota