Speeches

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 Bulgaria, which is the EU’s current most disadvantaged Member State. CAP will not exist as we now know it. The European Council estimates a 20 % cut in CAP payments to existing Member States will be needed to allow for Ukrainian accession. In this communication on pre-enlargement reforms and policy reviews last month, the Commission again stated that further enlargement of the EU would require the end of unanimity voting. The Commission specifically said that qualified majority voting should be extended to taxation and foreign policy. This will have a profound impact on Ireland. It would put Ireland at the mercy of other larger Member States and their hawkish foreign policy. It will be the death of Irish neutrality. We need to think about where we’re going.

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 another record high of homelessness. The latest numbers of people accessing emergency accommodation in Ireland is 13 841. That includes more than 4 000 children. Between 2010 and the fourth quarter of 2023, rents in Ireland increased by 102 %, according to Eurostat. Ireland has the highest housing costs in the EU, according to the latest Eurostat data for 2022, 112 % above the EU average. Some 68 % of adults between the age of 25 and 29 in Ireland – 68 % – are living at home with parents. I have a lot of respect for Esther Lynch, General Secretary of the European Trades Union Congress, or signatories on the Declaration, but I trust not in the von der Leyen side.

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 know still use cash, including myself, and penalising them for using over EUR 10 000 for something like a funeral seems draconian and hardly proportionate. The regulation also seems totally at odds with the Commission’s proposal in 2023 to protect cash, which stated that the proposal will ensure that everyone in the euro area is free to choose their preferred payment method and has access to basic cash services. It will ensure the financial inclusion of vulnerable groups, who tend to rely more on cash payments, such as older people. You say, Commissioner, that they are targeting illegal activity, but you know that successive Irish governments have refused to tackle the illegal financial activity of NAMA, the biggest financial scandal in Ireland’s history. Will big corruption still be ok or are things going to change?

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 the war against Yemen that killed 400 000 people, the genocide in Gaza that has killed or maimed over 100 000 Palestinians in just six months, and in the sanctions against Syria and Iran that kill tens of thousands through preventable deaths every year. We have endless debates here about human rights, but these people you vote to crush are not afforded human rights. You pretend the EU is civilised. In your suits, you condemn people to die with your voting cards, blatantly lying to excuse your actions. The banality of evil. This place is a stain on humanity. Mr Borrell, we respect your effort to bring some sanity to the place.

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 interfere in it. Through NGOs, the EU and US used our wealth to set up parallel publics in non-EU countries like Georgia. These influential, yet unelected, NGO representatives have access to resources and politicians in Brussels and Washington, hold sway in institutions, effectively spread propaganda and police the terms of debate. The stir up protest and destabilisation in order to forward the strategic aims of their foreign paymasters. The foreign agents law is flawed, but if it is enacted it would be a result of anti-democratic EU and US meddling in Georgia. You have pushed too hard for too long.

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 breaking international law. You say that you’re only taking the revenue and you’re not taking the capital of the assets, but this recklessness will open a Pandora’s box, and just like the sanctions, this could easily rebound on the EU. This recklessness will undermine your own Western capitalist financial system. Now, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are dead. Russia is gaining territory against the demoralised and exhausted, ageing army of conscripts. More reports are coming out detailing how close we were to a peace deal in April 2022. Why are we still pushing for war? How many more Ukrainians must be sacrificed in this stupid, avoidable war?

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 Russia, you all remembered how to apply international law and more. It extended to Russian novelists, dog shows, any sport you can imagine. But as Israel murders more children than in any other global conflict, and all of it in the last five years, you couldn’t even muster one sanction. This is the EU’s Madeleine Albright moment. Is the slaughter of tens of thousands of children a price worth paying to maintain EU interests? It looks like the answer is yes. Sadly, settler colonialism, apartheid and genocide are integral to the order that built and sustains the EU.

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 France, they blocked condemnation of this crime at the UN Security Council. Von der Leyen gave the diplomatic cover for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, while the US, Britain, Germany and France provide the arms, logistics and support for the crime of crimes. European powers are still perpetrating genocide in the 21st century. The mask is gone. All the propaganda about civilisation, international law and EU values, it’s all been exposed. The EU has now to decide, is there going to be accountability for those who have facilitated genocide? Or will the EU be seen as a defender of the law of the jungle?

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 still refusing calls for an initiative to secure a ceasefire. We cannot continue cheerleading conflicts worldwide, imposing famine conditions on millions of Palestinians and supporting sanctions that increase unemployment while claiming to protect victims of trafficking. And all the warmongering being engaged in by the EU only makes things worse. The recent migration pact has destroyed individual right to asylum. Because of the policies we implement, children at our borders will be greeted with fingerprinting and increased detention. Yet this directive promises victims a straightforward, child-centred approach to international protection. God help us.

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 spoke of independence, of breaking free of the system of exploitation that was established under the European colonialism. We use powerful lending institutions, like the World Bank and the IMF, to impose debt traps on former colonies, to keep them from developing. We force structural reforms on countries who defaulted on these impossible debt arrangements, ensuring that Western capital maintains the ability to exploit Global South resources. We have systematically de-developed former colonies in order to make lives cheap, workforces and resources cheaper and to maintain profits for Western capital at all costs. Anyone who steps out of line, who challenges the system of Western-dominated global capitalism gets sanctions, regime change and war.

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 repair sector at a reasonable price. They will be prohibited from using contractual hardware or software barriers to repair, which is good news. However, we can still do much more to tackle consumption. Back in 2021, Parliament’s report on the circular economy action plan called on the Commission to propose targets to significantly reduce the EU’s material and consumption footprint by 2030 and bring them within planetary boundaries by 2050. Binding targets of this sort would make an enormous difference, but sadly, the Commission refuses act. Why?

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 for operators handling quantities under 1000 tonnes per year. But all operators, no matter what quantity they are handling, can contribute chronic losses to the environment. Implementation of the regulations should be accelerated in terms of certification and verification. 184 000 tonnes of pellets enter the environment each year, and we shouldn’t have a four-year lead in that period either. That would also give us a realistic chance of meeting the Zero Pollution Action Plan target of a 30 % microplastic-release reduction by 2030.

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 supported on 7 October and Iran are met with strong condemnation from the EU. The hypocrisy is shocking. Why are you turning a blind eye to the actions of Israel? Are you trying to provide cover for them? Let’s not make total fools of ourselves. Our proposal to modify the debate is as follows: Israel’s attack on Iran’s diplomatic premises; Iran’s unprecedented retaliation against Israel; and the need for de-escalation and an EU response - to be taken by roll-call vote.

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 the UN Security Council resolution, which Israel is flouting. We are allowing international law to be shredded to bits. The international legal system is at stake. The Palestinians are being murdered in their tens of thousands. Silence is a choice, and it’s not a good one. Our proposed title is ‘EU’s response to the ICJ provisional measures, the UN Security Council Resolution 2728 calling for a ceasefire and the repeated killing of humanitarian aid workers, journalists and civilians by the Israeli Defence Forces in the Gaza Strip.

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 from and further compound their genocidal assault on the men, women and children of Gaza. The refugees of Gaza are reduced to eating animal feed and grasses. Death by starvation is on the rise. Water is contaminated. Thousands of children are suffering and wasting. The conditions orchestrated by Israel have put at risk 50 000 pregnant Palestinian women and 20 000 newborn babies, increasing miscarriages by up to 300 %. And many of the right-wing are still advancing lies in order to ensure the plight of Palestinians worsens even further. – In bocca al lupo al Toro sabato contro la Juve. Juve è merda, forza Toro.

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 assault on Gaza, President von der Leyen tweeted a picture of the flag projecting and said ‘the European Union stands with Israel’. A record released in the Irish news site The Ditch showed that the Commission paid the contractor EUR 28 000 plus for the work. The same week, von der Leyen travelled to Tel Aviv to tell the butcher Netanyahu that he had the EU’s unconditional support. She engaged in unauthorised diplomacy on behalf of the EU. She unilaterally participated in war propaganda spectacles for an apartheid, genocidal regime. Her actions are nothing short of a coup. And for all of this, the European taxpayers foot the bill.

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 fund to strengthen borders, and to pay countries outside the EU to actively prevent migrants from entering the EU. This pact will mean increasing use of detention, even for families and children. This is the debt of the individual right to asylum as we know it. This is not how we should treat people. Ursula von der Leyen’s vision and values do have much in common with how Israel has warehoused the people of Palestine in an open-air prison for decades, but these are not the values of the ordinary people of Europe, and they want to see the end of von der Leyen.

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 genocide with the requisite intent: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. Israel is guilty of genocide – the crime of crimes – because we have afforded them impunity for their crimes against the Palestinians for 76 years. Words are not enough. We need arms embargoes. We need the Association Agreement suspended. The concept of international law is meaningless in the mouths of EU leaders as long as they refuse to apply it or hold Israel accountable for genocide, and all those who have helped to facilitate it.

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 seriously challenges EU claims to have anything to do with progress and humanity. For hundreds of years we have genocided and plundered using our gains to enrich ourselves. We have strangled many independent movements with death traps and forced development through structural adjustment programmes. In North Africa and the Middle East, people flee NATO regime change wars and their fallout, climate change caused by the developed North, and the neoliberal impact of the IMF and the World Bank. And what do we do? We pay corporate lawyers to detain and kill the people looking for a better life than the one that we’ve helped to create for them.

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. The population of Cape Clear has stagnated with a dramatic 25% drop from 2016 to 2022, and right now there’s only a handful of kids in the national school on the island. The islanders identify housing as the main policy failure. There are some amazing community leaders on the island. They have a plan to build four family homes on the island for rent, for the sole use of new full-time residents. The houses would function as transitional accommodation to attract new families. I think the government and the local authority in Cork need to work together with islanders to try and make this happen. Everything is possible – tout est possible.

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, sadly, successive governments have engaged in neoliberal policies that do not prioritise the interests of the most vulnerable in society. That should change, and it would be great if the European Union could play a positive role in addressing that. And speaking of children, let’s not forget that there are 12 000 children who have been killed by the Israeli regime in Gaza. There are 180 births a day at the moment in Gaza, and the healthcare facilities for birth and for postnatal care have been destroyed. God help us!

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 to EUR 25 billion alone. Yet at the same time, living standards are deteriorating across Member States. In Ireland, as of today, there’s over 13 500 people homeless and over 4 000 of them are children. So we have record tax receipts and we have record homeless figures. And Ireland is not alone. Across Europe last year, 45 million people could not afford to keep their homes adequately warm. In 2022, food prices went up 11% in Europe and energy prices 27%, as a direct result of the war in Ukraine. We are promoting a US proxy war at the expense of our citizens. We should think again.

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: firstly under Napoleon, and secondly under the Vichy government. As of 2024, half of all the artwork stolen by Napoleon still remains in France. And, God knows, British museums are stuffed with stolen artefacts. Any chance that they might start returning it to the rightful owners? In recent times, we have had money stolen from the Afghan central bank by the Americans and the Swiss and some UK banks. Any chance that they might return that, because it is needed for humanitarian purposes in Afghanistan? We have also had UK banks who have stolen money from Venezuela. There’s gold in London belonging to the Venezuelans, but the Brits have stolen it. Maybe the EU should put some pressure on everyone to return what they have stolen. There are a lot of thieves around!

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 been blocked by Israel. But reading the text, you wouldn’t know it. The Israelis are carrying out extrajudicial executions of men, women and children, but youse won’t talk about it. The Israelis are imposing famine conditions and using starvation as a weapon of war against 2.3 million civilians. But listening to ye, you’d swear it was a natural disaster. We don’t like the Taliban, but they’re not killing tens of thousands of civilians. Yet youse are throwing the book at them, when you can’t even bring yourselves to properly name the genocidal crimes of the Israeli regime. Is it because youse are complicit in the war crimes of the Israelis? What is wrong with this place?

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 billion a year for seven years, or EUR 7 billion a year for four years. This means a total of EUR 28 billion will be removed from the public spending powers and taken out of the Belgian economy up to the end of the decade. This amounts to an attack on democracy and a hollowing out of the welfare state. It’s madness that the fiscal rules imposed by the Maastricht Treaty are essentially undermining public spending still. While we encourage Member States to spend more and more on defence, we allowed the fiscal rules to reduce state support for citizens that most need them.