Speeches

Madam President, in 1987, over 100 000 people gathered in Paris to declare poverty a violation of human rights. But we seem to have forgotten it. In the EU now, human rights generally refers to civic and political rights. Taking social and economic rights off the table in the human rights debate is a huge con job on the part of neoliberalism. In her excellent book, The Morals of the Market, Jessica Whyte talks about the effort during the past 100 years to redefine and enforce a set of rights that are compatible with the market economy. And we’ve seen in the EU, which has been criticised by the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty, for relegating social economic rights to second tier aspirational principles. In doing so, he said, the EU has all but declared poverty a necessary evil. And it is little wonder that poverty is still rampant in the EU.

Mr President, if the political class of the EU cared about human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran, they wouldn’t be clamouring to impose new unilateral sanctions. If we cared about the protection of human rights in a consistent, principled manner, we would condemn the relentless murder of Palestinian men, women and children by Israeli forces – every single plenary. We would address the tens of thousands of ordinary working class Syrians, Lebanese, Venezuelans, Yemenis, Zimbabweans, Cubans and Iranians that are being killed by US and EU unilateral sanctions and embargoes. On 12 September, the UN Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights, Alena Douhan, published her report on secondary sanctions and sanctions over—compliance. It describes how over—compliance with even so-called targeted sanctions is killing masses of women, children, the sick and the old, in particular in these targeted countries. US and EU sanctions are killing Iranians, and you don’t care. You want more sanctions, and more dead Iranians – in the name of human rights, no less. It’s sickening!

Mr President, neoliberal reforms have weakened public healthcare systems all over Europe. These reforms have disastrous impacts on the ability of healthcare systems to handle the pandemic. Democratisation of health and long—term care, the push for public—private partnerships and the public spending cuts encouraged by EU economic governance processes like the European Semester have all contributed to the increased commercialisation, privatisation and reduction of health and long—term care services. A UN Development Programme report examined the effects of healthcare privatisation on COVID-19. It found that a 10% increase in private health expenditure corresponds to a 4.3% increase in COVID cases and a 4.9% increase in COVID—related mortality. The EU needs to end its neoliberal policies, and this is particularly true in the current context of the development of the European Health Union.

Mr President, decades of policies designed to promote the use of artificial fertilizers, instead of more resilient farming methods, have exacerbated farmers’ vulnerability to this crisis. A chronic over—dependence on livestock farming has compounded the problem. Grassland makes up more than 80% of the utilised agricultural area on farms in Ireland. We don’t use fertilizer to grow food for humans; we use it to grow food for animals. One of the first grain ships to leave Odessa in August, after the lifting of the blockade, went not to Africa but to Ireland. It got a heroic welcome. It had 33 tonnes of grain on it for animals. Of course, Russia can take action to resolve the fertilizer crisis, but what’s the EU doing to stop the war? We continue to support the US—NATO proxy war, irrespective of what it costs the people of Europe and the world.

Mr President, in Tigray, as in every war, it would appear that all sides have reasons to distort the truth as to what’s happening on the ground. We’ve had conflicting narratives about the break-out of the war, denials of Eritrean involvement. We’ve had the Ethiopian ambassador come before our committee and tell us that the European government were doing everything in their power to facilitate aid to Tigray, when we knew it wasn’t true. What is clear is that one of the worst humanitarian crises on earth is unfolding in Ethiopia because of the war. Yet, sadly, we couldn’t get agreement from the main groups here for action on humanitarian visas for those at risk. Nor would they agree to an arms embargo on weapons to Ethiopia and Eritrea. Why? What they could agree on was calls for sanctions on an area where millions are facing starvation. Sanctions that will hit the poorest and the weakest on both sides the most, as usual. It is good that we do agree on the need to work for peace and to call for peace. And it’s a pity that we don’t call for peace in Ukraine as well.

Mr President, Western imperialism has never stopped punishing Haiti for the crime of being the first black majority nation to successfully carry out an anti-colonial revolution, when they kicked out the French in 1804. Since then, the US and France have colluded to kill at least five sitting presidents and engineered countless coups. The reversal of the Aristide coup by the Haitian people was met with crushing neoliberal reforms forced by the Clinton regime. A second coup against Aristide in ‘04 by the French and Americans ushered in pro-West leadership that ensured no nation—building would be carried out, no investment in infrastructure that might help Haiti to prepare for earthquakes and the ravages of global warming. The successful defiance of the Haitian people has been met with 200 years of imperialists attempting to keep them on their knees and then shedding crocodile tears at the resulting instability. I’d like to know, what right have we got to be interfering in this sovereign nation?

Mr President, the scale of this disaster is incredible. One million homes have disappeared, and 33 million Pakistanis have been displaced. More than ever, this is a time for climate justice. Real climate justice means loss and damage payments. It means climate reparations from those who are most responsible for climate change – the developed West – to those who are the least responsible and the most affected. The 2021 Glasgow Climate Pact was a failure in terms of agreeing loss and damages for the most vulnerable nations. The EU is forever telling us about its climate leadership, despite the fact that the Green Deal targets are well below what is required from the Global North. Will the EU and the Member States take responsibility and provide reparations on this occasion, or is Pakistan not part of our geopolitical plans? Climate change, not the war in Ukraine, is by far the biggest crisis facing this planet.

I’d like to ask the MEP a question about climate justice. You say that Pakistan should ask India and China, the big polluters, for compensation for climate change. We know for a fact that climate change has been predominantly caused by the developed world – ours. The West has been predominantly responsible for the impact of climate change, but they’re not the ones that feel the impact of it. Pakistan emits less than 1% of the world emissions. Tell me, why should the people responsible for climate change not give them reparations?

Madam President, I welcome many aspects of this report, especially the strong emphasis on environmentalism. But we need to focus more on the problem of privatisation, which is prolific – with over 10% of global freshwater reserves being under private control. In Ireland, as my colleague pointed out, we fought against water charges for years. It is a neoliberal measure firmly promoted by the Commission as a bailout condition in 2012. We were doing what we were told on a vast basis at the time. This profit—orientated neoliberal practice severely limited access to water and sanitation services – which, as many of you agree, is a human right, and this will further add to the problem of water shortages, which has already disproportionately affected the global South. While there have been steps to recognise water as a primary public good within the Union, with the Right2Water initiative, not enough has been done to stop its privatisation in the EU and beyond.

Madam President, the Horn of Africa report refuses to acknowledge that the EU was even partially responsible for the problems in the region. It condescendingly assumes that African nations’ lack of support for the NATO proxy war with Russia is down to Russian propaganda and not governments making a rational choice not to pick sides in a new Cold War. The report talks about aid to alleviate potential famines and other disasters when we know full well our sanctions and unwillingness to pursue peace are creating the very humanitarian disasters we say we want to alleviate. The report suggests that we consider encouraging Member States to look at debt cancellation. ‘Consider encouraging’ will do nothing for countries crushed with debt obligations that siphons to the north any public money that could be used to shore up climate and famine defences. And we condemn the call for increased border security and militarisation. Is there any interest in putting a stop to neocolonial extraction and theft? We give them a basket of bread for aid and then we robbed their field of corn.

Mr President, instability, coups and French embassies being set on fire in former French colonies are becoming a bit more regular. Existing contradictions are being exacerbated by the sanctions on Russia, by the continuation of the war and by the inflationary spiral; by the climate crisis, by neo-colonial structures of exploitation, such as the French colonial franc system where France still receives a colonial tax from 14 former colonies – to loan them back their own money with high interest rates when ensuring government contracts to French companies. When not toppling leaders in the region who fought for independence and Pan-Africanism, France and the West are presiding over prolonged neo-colonial theft that has meant governance structures are basically non-existent in the rural areas of these former colonies. Instead of addressing the crisis through debt cancellation or reversing neoliberal restructuring and privatisation, the West responds with militarism that has worsened the security situation. If the EU won’t take its foot off the necks of these people, sooner or later, they will be forced to do so.

Madam President, I’m not a fan of Orbán, but then I’m not a fan of any other leader either. In fact, I’ve never seen a government that I like. I think the idea of respecting freedom of expression and respecting human rights is very important. If there’s things not being done, if behaviour is poor anywhere, we should criticise it, but I think it’s very important that we do so evenly and consistently – and I don’t see that. Right now today, freedom of expression is under threat in Europe – anyone that criticises the general narrative to the war – and there are people that have been arrested for expressing their opinion when that doesn’t suit the agenda. Human rights. We talked about the Roma this morning. The Roma have never been given human rights across Europe. We have a housing crisis in many countries of Europe. So many people are being denied the human right to a house. We don’t treat the poor people of Europe well. We don’t respect their human rights. When are we going to become consistent in how we approach these problems?

Madam President, in March this year, the European Committee of Social Rights (ECSR) determined that Ireland was in breach of Article 16 of the revised European Social Charter, a binding human rights treaty, for a chronic failure to provide sufficient accommodation for travellers and maintain adequate conditions of existing sites. The ECSR also ruled that Ireland was in breach of the charter as a significant number of local authority tenants resided in inadequate and substandard housing conditions. Since 2000, EUR 69 million earmarked for traveller housing hasn’t been spent. It continues today. We are still underspending the money that’s earmarked for them. The questions posed by the Employment and Social Rights Committee to the Commission are good, but it is difficult to have faith in the Commission holding Member States to account given how long traveller and Roma people have had to endure these chronic failures and the weakness of the EU Roma Strategic Framework. We talk forever in here about human rights. But you know what? Until we start treating all the people in the same way, we should shut up about human rights because we are only been hypocrites.

Madam President, this is a very positive development and it has caught people’s attention. People understand it will save them money and reduce clutter in their homes. They also appreciate that electronic waste is a massive problem and it does urgently need to be tackled. People have also welcomed the common charger proposal because they are tired of consumerism. They are tired of consumerism in general, and in particular tired of the kind of pointless, unnecessary and utterly destructive consumerism that means the EU vastly exceeds its own planetary boundaries still. This is a first step. We also urgently need a legally binding right to repair, and legislative measures to halve food waste by 2030. The Parliament’s report on the EU’s circular economy action plan called on the Commission to propose targets to significantly reduce the EU’s material and consumption footprints by 2030 and bring them within planetary boundaries by 2050. This was a radical demand, but when will the Commission act?

The UN Charter is the foundational treaty of the United Nations, since 1945. When Russia invaded Ukraine, they breached the rules of the UN Charter. It was illegal. Sadly, it has been breached far too often. I’ve just read this excellent book by Vijay Prashad and Noam Chomsky: The Withdrawal. It highlights how the UN Charter has been abused. Here are a few quotes from the book: ‘The war in Afghanistan was unprovoked, it was an illegitimate aggression, and it was a severe atrocity.’; ‘40% of civilians killed by airstrikes were children.’; ‘The US had no basis whatsoever for invading Afghanistan.’ The UN Charter was ignored. The US assassination campaign by drones is the worst territorial campaign in the world so far. It kills people that the US believes pose a threat to the US or to its interests. The UN Charter is ignored. In 1991, the US refused to accept Saddam’s surrender and bombed everywhere they could. When asked why, President Bush said, ‘We’ve shown that what we say goes’. The UN Charter was ignored. It’s long past time that all countries should respect the UN Charter, and the UN or the EU should have nothing to do with those that don’t.

Madam President, it's good that in this resolution we're calling for international measures to end nuclear and military waste in the oceans. Anywhere you find a foreign military base, you will find high levels of contamination and a marine environment struggling to cope. Look at Guam, look at Hawaii, French Polynesia, the Marshall Islands. The people and the marine ecosystems suffer catastrophically at the hands of the military industrial complex’s total carelessness. We let them treat the oceans as if they were privatized, but they are not – the ocean is a global common good. The USA has conducted more nuclear weapons tests than all other nations combined, responsible for unspeakable levels of radiation in the Pacific. If we fail to stand up to military contamination, then we may forget about EU efforts for ocean protection. We need denuclearization, demilitarization and peace, and a different approach between humans and the sea.

Madam President, over 1 300 people killed, 1 million homes gone, 33 million Pakistanis displaced, but does the EU care? The UN Secretary-General has appealed for massive global support and tougher action on climate change. We’ve allocated EUR 1.8 million in humanitarian assistance for flood victims. How much are we going to allocate for loss and damage to help survivors build back their homes? Rich nations have an urgent responsibility to reduce their emissions, but not enough is being done. The EU is now undermining its climate goals to facilitate the US/NATO proxy war in Ukraine. Across Europe, Member States are turning back to coal or to filthy fracked US LNG. The Greens are in government in Germany. Germany is re-firing coal plants and agreeing LNG terminal contracts like there’s no tomorrow. The EU and its citizens are paying a massive financial and climate cost to support this proxy war. And just my last point. Well done to Damien Thomson on this resolution, but very sad to see the PPE Group put in an amendment which calls on the Commission to refrain from proposing further EU legislation that endangers or risks endangering our food security. This is more clawback. This is not the way forward.

Madam President, for a river that is home to over 40 local species of fish, the 100 tonnes of dead fish pulled from the River Oder is nothing short of an ecological disaster. But it shouldn’t take an unmitigated ecological disaster to wake us up to the crisis state that the rivers and water sources are in across Europe. It’s not just in Poland. Every Member State should be in crisis mode. According to data from the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), 60% of Europe’s rivers, lakes and wetlands are not in good ecological health. Since the seventies, the level of European freshwater species have dropped by a staggering 81%. Almost half of Ireland’s rivers have unsatisfactory water quality levels, and there was a decline in water quality in 230 rivers recorded in Ireland in 2020. The state of our rivers, the state of our waters right across Europe can be boiled down to simply EU Member States not wanting to make EU water legislation work. The legislation is there, it’s not being implemented. Major polluters from industry and agriculture are running amok. Is the Commission prepared to act?

Mr President, the investment plans and aspirational language are a far cry from the reality for many of the southern neighbourhood countries. Barely two years ago, France and Italy were fighting each other in a proxy war over control of Libyan resources, and the report is talking about the EU promoting peace and stability in the region? Let’s not forget, France led the charge when NATO bombed Africa’s most prosperous nation back to the Stone Age, and in arming extremist militias and warlords are currently fighting each other in Tripoli. Syria was also a prosperous nation prior to NATO’s failed regime change war and the illegal sanctions that now cripple the country, while foreign powers occupy Syria and steal its resources. As was Palestine, which is suffering under brutal EU-backed Israeli occupation, bombings and apartheid. The Western sanctions imposed in response to the war are driving the entire region into crisis. Further IMF loans increased indirect taxation, which hits the poor, cutting public services which increases unemployment. Let’s face it, we are busy destroying the southern neighbourhood.

Mr President, real wages are collapsing around Europe. In Spain in the last year, real wages are down 8.1%; in Italy, 7.5%. Real wages are down 5% on average in Ireland. But Europe’s lowest paid workers are facing the biggest fall in their purchasing power this century. The real statutory minimum wage in many Member States has been decimated. In the last year the change to the real statutory minimum wage, is a staggering 19% cut: in the Czech Republic, 10%, and in the Netherlands, it’s a 6.6% cut. Only yesterday, the Irish Government announced that it will increase the minimum wage by 80 cents, up to EUR 11.30 per hour. But EUR 11.30 is not an increase in real terms at all. In real terms, it will be a cut. The headline figure is a 7.6% increase, but inflation is currently running at 8.7% and could be even higher next year when the increase takes effect. What low paid workers really need is a living wage, but by the time that the minimum wage increase takes effect in Ireland in January 2023, we’ll be further away from a living wage than we were in 2021.

Madam President, Bishop Alvarez, like anyone, should have a right to voice opposition to the government. The violent US-backed coup in 2018 resulted in approximately 200 deaths on both sides. The National Endowment for Democracy and the CIA funded some far-right criminals who plotted death and destruction. Bishop Alvarez, with his own TV station and several radio stations, was also heavily involved. He may be a bishop, but Raymundo Alvarez is no saint. The crimes he is accused of are serious and require a fair and thorough investigation. Instead of rushing to condemn, we need support to call up Pope Francis for a return to dialogue between church and state and encourage a return to peace and stability. The right to dissent and to voice political opposition to those in power should never be a crime, not in Nicaragua or anywhere else. We've seen people arrested and media banned in Russia, Ukraine and the EU for opposing the war narrative. Freedom of expression is under threat everywhere, sadly.

Madam President, climate systems’ break down is barrelling ahead at full speed and we’re recommending that TotalEnergies undertake a feasibility study on an environmentally friendly road for the 1 400-kilometre-long pipeline. The question should be what we do with the likes of TotalEnergies. We make all kinds of agreements on climate action, and these companies behave like there is no climate disaster. In fact, the scrambling to tap into new oil fields. Over USD 500 billion will be spent on developing new oil fields between now and 2030. Conflicts are raging around the world, especially where climate disaster is undermining sustainable living for the many. And oil companies are persuading governments to send armies and militias to quash the instability so that they can safely extract the fossil fuels that will intensify the climate crisis. This is a downward spiral towards oblivion. But under the system of capitalism, the profits of merchants of debt like TotalEnergies are more important than life itself.

Madam President, there is a huge leap from what the Assistant UN Secretary-General for Human Rights told the Security Council a week ago and what this resolution is claiming. The Secretary-General spoke about human rights violations at the site of security checks of Ukrainians. She also raised concerns that the Russian authorities have adopted a simplified procedure to grant Russian citizenship to children without parental care. Under Article 50 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Russian Federation is prohibited from changing these children’s personal status, including nationality. It is also highly concerning that normal procedures around family reunification appear to be disregarded. But the resolution is stating that between 1 and 2.5 million Ukrainians have been forcibly deported to Russia. These are the ridiculous claims of Kyiv and Washington made with no supporting scientific evidence in the fog of war. We should call on Russia to respect international law and the Global Compact for Migration, as should the EU, and Parliament should not be used to regurgitate unfounded accusations.

Mr President, this is a good report, but will the Commission act on it? Last week, over 60 Syrian and Lebanese migrants were left stranded in a sinking fishing boat in the middle of the Mediterranean. We left them there for four days without help and four children on board died as a result of our inaction. This is barbaric, but it’s just fortress Europe doing what it’s set up to do. In fact, it’s exactly what the Members of this Parliament voted for back in 2019. Over 3 200 people were reported dead or missing in the Mediterranean last year – over 3 200! And that’s not to mention those who fell victim to illegal pushbacks at the Greek-Turkish border or the 37 refugees killed by Spanish and Moroccan border guards at Melilla this spring or the innocent migrants detained in Greece, charged with people smuggling. We sit here in our cosy European fortress; migrants die at our borders. And people in here keep talking about European values – what values I’d like to know?

Madam President, why has it taken the EU so long to intervene in the markets? The energy market started spiking almost a year ago. The energy prices haven’t come from nowhere. For many Europeans, the struggle to pay their energy bills is not a new phenomenon. One in four European households already struggled to adequately heat, cool or light their homes before what is now called a crisis. Market fundamentalism has caused this problem, but has also denied the possibility of any kind of a rapid response. If the EU and its Member States are serious about tackling the crisis and reducing consumption, they need to guarantee energy—efficient housing, public services, higher wages and adequate public transport for all. We should end the self—defeating sanctions that are not helping matters. They are hurting the ordinary people of Europe a lot more than they’re ever going to hurt Putin, and they are not going to stop the war!