Speeches

Mr President, I have to say, I really welcome this report because I firmly believe that alternative dispute resolution processes should be used as widely as possible, whether it’s consumer law or family law. Things like mediation get results that are at least as good, if not actually better than anything that would come out of a court process. And given the huge issues facing, for example, Ireland’s family law system, including the massive problems with concepts such as parental alienation creeping into it and being put forward by court experts who aren’t experts, it really would be better if we were to support available and robust and effective mediation processes. I come from a country with some of the highest legal costs in Europe. They are at levels which have been criticised consistently in the EU rule of law reports as being a barrier to justice. That means that alternative dispute resolution is often people’s only option and if that’s not available, then they’re out of options. So I’m really glad to see it being put centre stage in this report.

Mr President, EU sanctions: when they are not backfiring against ordinary Europeans, they are firing on all cylinders against ordinary people in the Global South. By overwhelming majorities, the United Nations General Assembly and the UN Human Rights Council have over the years again and again and again and again, condemned the kinds of unilateral sanctions that the EU and US apply against poorer countries. They have said that they disproportionately harm the most vulnerable. They have said that they undermine people’s human rights. Again and again, they have called on the West to stop adopting and implementing them. And here we are not only ignoring this global condemnation, but going further and criminalising those who dare to fail to comply with them in the first place. Meanwhile, we refuse to impose a sanction that we are legally obligated to impose – that of an arms embargo on Israel. This, friends, is the rules-based international order. Sixty percent of people worldwide who rely on humanitarian aid are in countries under sanction. Most need aid because of the sanctions. Sanctions are weapons of war in the Global South. They starve and they destroy. And they most always never achieve what they are supposed to do. The definition of madness is repeating the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, but we know when it comes to human rights, the EU lost its mind quite some time ago.

Mr President, I’m very disappointed that despite the rapporteur’s best intentions and efforts to keep this file ambitious, his work was undercut by his Irish Government colleagues’ Group, the EPP. This was a chance to do many things at once: to use climate money effectively, while also addressing social inequality. But with Member States marking their own homework, and given that the Council had already filleted it, it’s unlikely to deliver in that regard – and particularly, as colleagues have pointed out, the lack of clear commitment to public money being used – the type of public money necessary to make this transition. In 2019, this Union was handed an historic mandate for climate action by citizens, including, particularly, young people, in light of the very urgent threat to civilisation. Five years down the road, the planet is burning, but one file after another is retreating into reaction. The planet and humanity, frankly, don’t have time for this.

Mr President, we are in the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine – hundreds of thousands dead, millions displaced and Ukraine lost as an independent state. Yet the only solution that people in here can come up with is to continue the failed policies that you’ve been implementing for the last two years. So I voted against this resolution. I voted against it because only 93 people in here consider that it is necessary in all conflicts to undertake diplomatic efforts to end them, because only 71 people here regret that political and diplomatic efforts are not being used to end the war. I regret the fact that Parliament failed to take account of the writing-off and the cancellation of Ukraine’s debt to adhere to human rights and labour rights, and so on. The truth of the matter is that the only interests we’re serving are the ones of the military industrial complex – not Ukraine at all.

Mr President, as the housing crisis rages across Europe and homelessness rises to historic levels, the impact of short-term rentals in our European cities is part of the problem. Now, it is not the main one but, nonetheless, I did vote for this file because we know that the short-term rental market accounts for around a quarter of all tourist accommodation in the EU, but how many residential units are being lost to short-term lettings? We don’t know. For far too long, the platforms have protected their data to hide the true nature of their impact on housing, to block the enforcement of regulation, and for too long to prevent cities from collecting taxes. But of course, we know their lobbying influence and how much sway they have. So it is about time that we tackle that and I think that this file does go a little bit of the way to do that, which is why I supported it. More important than that, we need to resolve the housing crisis. We need to build public housing now.

Mr President, for months now in Ireland, the media and the politicians have been obsessed with talk of immigration: we have to have an ‘honest’ conversation about migration, they tell us we have no choice in the matter at all. Funny enough now though, they’re very good at ignoring things when they want to. For example, if you’re demanding a right to housing or healthcare or disability rights, well then they don’t want to know. But if you’re talking about immigration, then you’re not talking about those things. You’re not talking about how your state is serving transnational capital rather than the citizens. In reality, it is the great deceit. In Britain, for example, they’ve been consumed by a conversation about migration for more than a decade now. Savage austerity? Well, it got right off the hook. So, while they were being ‘honest’ about migration, child poverty skyrocketed. Britain now has the highest child poverty, housing is broken, people are hounded to death, austerity is a permanent policy while the rich get richer. And migration? Same as it always was. This conversation is a distraction. No wonder the establishment love it.

Mr President, much of the submarine cables that we’re so desperate to secure are not actually public infrastructure, but are private property owned by multinational consortia whose beneficial owners are mostly unknown, registered in tax havens or – like Google – have more than enough money anyway to fix a problem if something happens. And something happens regularly: 25% of cables are ruptured every single year by maritime activity, negligence and natural impacts. And nobody even notices because the traffic is simply rerouted. A report commissioned for the Security and Defence Committee – months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine – stated that there were no verified reports indicating deliberate attacks on the cable network by any actor, and that the large-scale scenario of complete lack of connectivity suggests a substantial risk of threat inflation. So is it not the case that this is just another part of the relentless drive to launder public money into the defence industry, this time underground? And what good would that do, considering the only actual explosion on the ground took place in a NATO heartland and nobody saw anything?

Mr President, the European Investment Bank has approved loans of EUR 650 million for Israeli infrastructure since the launch of its latest genocidal attack in Gaza. To give you an idea of the scale of what that represents, it’s the equivalent of 90 % of the EIB’s total investment in Palestine since its first loan in 1995. From 1995 to date, it’s invested more than EUR 2 billion in Israel, compared to EUR 725 million in Palestine. At the same time, we’ve seen countless examples of Israel destroying EU-funded projects with impunity in the West Bank, assets worth hundreds of thousands of euros, funded by countries like Ireland, being routinely destroyed by settlers. You’ve even managed to approve a loan to Israeli’s Leumi Bank for EUR 240 million in December, the same bank which has frozen UNRWA bank accounts. I’m wondering at this stage as to whether you’re actually complicit in genocide.

Mr President, the rights of all people must be respected. As I’ve said many times before, Alexei Navalny should not have been in prison. His death in detention is appalling and an impartial investigation into the circumstances absolutely necessary. But while respecting the dead, we also have to be accurate in our memories. Was he Russia’s democratic messiah? I don’t believe so. A courageous activist? Yes. But what kind? A free marketeer, a fan of the 90s reforms that led to Putin, a race-baiter ejected from the liberals who then founded a nationalist coalition with the extreme right and led anti-immigration rallies in the 2000s. A gun-rights activist who made ads joking about shooting Muslims. Of course, none of this justifies his treatments. His rights are just as important as anybody else. But if Navalny had been a socialist or a trade unionist, I don’t think anybody here would know his name. Two hundred Palestinian journalists have been murdered since October. They don’t matter, because our ally killed them. It’s very clear we care nothing about oppressed civil society unless it’s in our geopolitical interest.

Mr President, I think it’s slightly ironic that we’re having this discussion today, just over a week out from a referendum in Ireland that’s supposed to address inequality and discrimination, but that will actually just entrench both of them. The plan is to remove a discriminatory clause in our Constitution about women in the home to make women constitutional equals, but unfortunately it just replaces one discriminatory clause with one that’s just as discriminatory, one that will entrench inequalities just as much. Instead of misogynist language, we’ll have ableist language. We’ll get a constitutional provision that says care is the family’s problem, not society’s. The care amendment is useless and dangerous if what we want to do is to address inequality. Some of the most vulnerable people in Irish society, people who face the most entrenched inequalities, are asking us to say no. I think we should respect that.

Mr President, a humanitarian disaster is underway in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with the worsening security situation and a military build-up all away from the media spotlight – it’s barbarism. How many tragedies do we need to ignore? The International Committee of the Red Cross says the DRC has one of the highest numbers of forcibly displaced people in the world. The UN says that the DRC set a new record for the number of children killed, mutilated, abducted and raped last year for the third year running. Insecurity is fuelled by a web of geopolitics and rivalries, but critically, the struggle for the country’s abundant natural resources – a struggle, we know, which is led and enabled and bolstered by the EU support for Rwanda. We know that their grubby paws are devouring the DRC spoils, all to bolster the coffers of European multinationals. It’s about time the EU started shedding its old colonial mantle, demanding the upholding of international law and leave Africa for the Africans.

Madam President, of course, the situation in Cuba is critical. The economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed on Cuba by the United State for over 60 years violates the rights of all Cubans. An estimated 500 000 people emigrated in 2022 and 2023. The important tourism sector hasn’t recovered. The serious shortage of fuel has disturbed the distribution of food and caused hunger. The energy crisis has led to daily periods of mandatory power cuts, all orchestrated by US actions. It is a real bloodletting and the extraterritorial sanctions imposed by the US on European companies and citizens dealing with Cuba are being implemented in complete illegality. If the EU cares about rule of law, you should be demanding a lifting of the blockade, not trying to interfere with Cuba’s sovereign decision making in terms of matters of foreign affairs. Cuba has withstood an assault for 60 years. It holds the solidarity of people all over the world and they will prevail.

Madam President, Syria, ‘the land of a forgotten conflict’, says the explanatory statement on this report. And the report itself is certainly more than a little bit forgetful about how the dire situation as accurately described in Syria has come about. No mention of Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, the West, sudden onset selective amnesia. It’s as if we had nothing to do with this war. It just happened. As if the policy for a decade in Western capitals wasn’t regime change, as if thousands of men were not trained in CIA bases in Jordan in Operation Timber Sycamore, as if the US Senate’s allies didn’t facilitate USD 1 billion in weapons transfers to this war to that end. It didn’t work, and look at where it got you: half a million dead, food insecurity, arms proliferation, instability throughout the region. If you want to help Syria lift the sanctions, tell the US, Turkey and Israel to get out of Syria, let them run the country for their own ends.

Mr President, human rights are universal. That means everyone enjoys them equally. But the EU doesn’t believe in that anymore. In 2020, Ursula von der Leyen announced the EU’s new geopolitical agenda on human rights and democracy. These days, the EU is all about the rules-based international order, all about geopolitics. So when the European Council President Charles Michel congratulated vicious, old-school Azerbaijani dictator and ethnic cleanser of Nagorno-Karabakh Ilham Aliyev earlier this month on his ‘re-election’, that’s the EU’s geopolitical agenda on human rights and democracy in action. If your human rights are geopolitical rather than universal, then there’s no contradiction at all between, say, supporting a genocide in Gaza or congratulating a war criminal on his rigging of an election and then turning around a minute later and screaming at human rights abuses in Iran and Russia. In this agenda, human rights are only a stick to beat the people you don’t like with. Simple as that, easy peasy, might is right, and if you don’t like it, this is the new 19th century, same as the old.

Madam President, on 26 January, the International Court of Justice ruled that there’s a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza. It ordered Israel to stop killing civilians. Israel continued. The legal obligations on EU Member States are very clear. The genocide conventions require states to avoid complicity, the EU common position on arms exports bans exporting arms where there’s a clear risk they’ll be used to violate international law, and the UN has warned that such transfers must cease. Yet, France dissembles, hiding behind secrecy and Israeli assurances, while Germany has increased its exports tenfold last year, 90% since 7 October. Ireland doesn’t even ask Butcher Biden what’s coming through Shannon Airport from the US on the way to the Middle East. What sort of people are ye? In 1982, arch-conservative, pro-Israelis Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan stopped arms to Israel during a war. But in 2024, European Greens, Social Democrats and Liberals are arming a genocide. Shame on ye! International law and humanity requires lethal arms to Israel must stop now.

Mr President, last week, people from across Dublin gathered on Sandymount beach to fly flags, kites and read this poem from Refaat Alareer, Palestinian writer and teacher: ‘If I must die / you must live / to tell my story / to sell my things / to buy a piece of cloth / and some strings, / (make it white with a long tail) / so that a child, somewhere in Gaza / while looking heaven in the eye / awaiting his dad who left in a blaze – / and bid no one farewell / not even to his flesh / not even to himself – / sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up / above / and thinks for a moment an angel is there / bringing back love / If I must die / let it bring hope / let it be a tale’. Well, he shouldn’t have died or been murdered. Neither should any of the others. But millions will tell their tale and not just hope, but organise for justice and peace for Palestine and Gaza.

Mr President, PRIMA is a Horizon Europe project to sustainably manage water and agri-food systems in the Mediterranean basin. So could we please acknowledge the grotesque irony of Israel being one of its 19 partner countries, when Israel famously, notoriously and systematically deprives Palestinians of water rights and their farmland? It has deliberately subjected Palestinians to chronic water shortages for decades. So while Israel is a water superpower, thanks to massive investment in technological innovation – no doubt in part funded from the EU by Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe – Palestinians go thirsty. So will the EU funding that Israel gets through this programme be used to implement sustainable system of water rights and create a sustainable agri-food system for all, from the river to the sea? Or will it be used to pad the coffers of an apartheid state to help pay for the ongoing genocide in Gaza? I think we all know the answer.

Mr President, a Barnardo’s study last year found that 10 % of families in Ireland are now using food banks. A third of parents either skip meals or eat less in order to feed their children, and families with children have costing them 22 % more to put food on the table last year than it was the year before. We know across Europe and Britain, 5.7 million people were pushed into food insecurity. Shoplifting is at 15 % for food in France and 25 % in the Netherlands. As one UN special rapporteur has said, the impoverishment of Europeans is manifesting itself most visibly on the food front. Ordinary people are caught in the vice, being squeezed tighter and tighter by war, sanctions and neoliberal capitalism, and all our leaders can offer us is more of the same. They serve up a daily diet of polarisation and culture wars instead of any solutions. Something is going to give. If we don’t change course, it could be so-called European democracy.

Mr President, the Council’s blocking minority on the Platform Work Directive truly is an utter disgrace, indicating corporate capture. As far as I’m concerned, we need an ethics investigation into Uber and Deliveroo and who benefited from the change in policy because, despite two agreements in trilogues – the second of which was largely watered down as a result of the influence of France, Germany, Greece and Estonia – at the end of the day, they still said no. No to basic rights for precarious workers, 28 million of whom work via digital platforms in Europe, for which this original text represented at least a glimmer of hope for a way forward. Workers like the food delivery workers in Dublin, who recently went on strike on Valentine’s Day protesting against fluctuating pay levels. These workers, often migrants, have seen their wages plummet in favour of increasingly greedy platforms as they struggle to make ends meet. While these companies may block progress, collective action such as the ones shown in Dublin will be the way forward. Solidarity will prevail.

Mr President, I voted against this file because the situation in Venezuela is very volatile and the EU should stop the situation from escalating rather than engaging in geopolitical games. I mean, let’s remember, Venezuela’s GDP has shrunk 80 % in ten years, forcing 7 million people to flee that country. It’s a disaster humanly, economically and societally. And former US Secretary of State Pompeo boasted that this was what US sanctions had resulted in, a humanitarian crisis, he said, that was increasing by the hour. He seemed to revel in the fact that it was increasing pain and suffering to the Venezuelan people, and the Biden administration is continuing on with these sanctions. The Venezuelan government had reached an agreement that has now broken down, showing how weak trust is. Against that backdrop, the decision of the US to reimpose sanctions is really dangerous. We should be concentrating on a diplomatic resolution of the conflict in Venezuela.

Mr President, this oral question calls for the Commission to legislate to allow democratic scrutiny by the Parliament of the implementation of association agreements like Horizon Europe and I think the timing could not be better. Why, for example, is Israel part of Horizon Europe? Why does Israel get 22.73 % of grants under that programme? Why did European taxpayers’ money go to fund them in the development of Pegasus spyware that was used to target European journalists and politicians? And why is the EU-Israel Association Agreement still standing in the face of Israel’s genocide? Hundreds of thousands of people across Europe are asking for that agreement to be suspended. Even lukewarm supporters of Palestine in here get it. I abstained on this vote because while scrutiny would be an improvement in the situation, we need a lot more power than that. We need to break agreements when human rights are violated. We need to suspend this agreement now.

Mr President, I voted for this file because when the EU delegation goes to the UN Commission on the Status of Women in March, I want them to raise a few priorities. Priorities like war and its effect on women. How about the women in Gaza, where women and children make up 70 % of its victims. No doctor, no midwife, no nurse to support women during labour, no pain medication, no anaesthesia. Women have to use tent scraps to soak up their postpartum bleeding. Two mothers killed by Israel every hour, tens of thousands of babies and children without their mothers’ warm arms to hold them. Thousands have been left to scream and cry while they watched their mothers die in front of them. Women crushed by the most unimaginable grief, without a moment to recover, watching their children starve, but for the cruise missile feminists in here, there seems to be no fellow feeling – they want the atrocities to continue. That’s not feminism; it is an abomination. I don’t know if God will forgive them, but I and millions of others certainly won’t.

Mr President, like everybody else here, I think the death penalty is an abomination wherever it’s used – in Iran, in Saudi Arabia, in Alabama. I unreservedly oppose the boom of executions in Iran. The only acceptable number of executions anywhere is zero. Full stop! And in any other context, that would be all there would have to be to say on this subject. But we’re in the European Parliament, where human rights are weaponised and where the victims of human rights violations are only relevant where they can advance our interests or distract from our own crimes. Nobody in Europe enables Iranian executions. And how is this discussion going to help stop it? You’ve basically sanctioned everything there is there to sanction already. But we could stop and talk about the genocide in Israel, which we are enabling and which we could do something about. Can you not ask yourselves the question... (The President cut off the speaker)

Madam President, there is no doubt about it, there are considerable problems with the prison conditions in Belarus: widespread allegations of poor treatment, failure to access medicine, sufficient food and family visits, and widespread arbitrary arrest on tenuous grounds, often for being foreign agents. We ourselves have made repeated requests to go and see the labour and workers’ leaders Henadz Fiadynich, Vasil Berasneu and Vatslau Areshka, requests which have been denied by the Belarusian authorities, a situation which has happened to us in no other state begs the question: why were those visits not being facilitated? I think that, while asking those questions and liking to see these issues put the spotlight on, we have to say that it’s very regrettable that our credibility in raising these issues is seriously undermined by the fact that, inside the EU, we also have people arbitrarily arrested who are opposition journalists and so on. People like Pablo González, now two years in prison in Poland, that also is not on.

Mr President, we had a problem with this proposal from the very start, and I suppose the trilogue hasn’t really improved it much for us. We were asked to massively expand the EU machinery for sharing biometric data, with no evidence that this would do anything to make crime investigation more effective or more successful. We were just asked to trust the Commission that that would happen. Well, no thanks, I don’t think so! Not just that: we were asked to agree that third countries could launder their dodgy data into EU police forces’ data. For example, we now have a situation where the EU trusted partner Israel has a direct line to flag its political opponents – and there are many – to Europe’s police forces and to pursue them in Europe. And we’re supposed to bank on Europol’s notoriously shabby quality control to filter out the scurrilous falsehoods from the real thing. We know that that won’t happen. It’s another blank cheque for Israel to slander innocent people in Europe. But in any case, the whole thing is likely to be thrown out by the European Court of Justice on the grounds that it’s disproportionate.