Speeches

Mr President, the Killarney Coffee Cup Project is an amazing voluntary initiative by small businesses in the south-west of Ireland. They recently implemented a project that now includes over 50 businesses moving away from single-use coffee cups. Before the project started, Killarney was throwing away one million cups per year. Louise Byrne from the Killarney Coffee Cup Project said, ‘Often packaging and single-use items are not recycled or composted. They simply become general waste. Even if this waste source was managed correctly, it’s only in use for an average of 13 minutes.’ Considering the impact associated with deforestation, water stress, manufacturing, transportation and waste management, she said, ‘I don’t think its use justifies its existence.’ She said, ‘I would argue that watering down goals and policies sends the wrong message to people about political priorities and the true global risk of climate change.’ However, yet again, the EPP have joined forces with the far right to do exactly that: to water down ambition at the behest of the private packaging industry. Pretty sad.

Madam President, the science is clear that the climate and biodiversity crises are the biggest threats to global food security. There’s not a single serious scientist in Europe who would argue that this new Pesticides Regulation or the Nature Restoration Law would pose a risk to European food security. The main objective of the proposal is not to even ban pesticides, but to replace them with safe and sustainable alternatives. Yet, some of the right-wing groups in here have declared that their intention is to kill the Pesticides Regulation, and they have done their best to do the same with the Nature Restoration Law. They want to delete the national reduction targets, which will totally undermine the chances of achieving the overall EU target, and to delay the 2030 reduction targets to 2035. They claim to be defending farmers on food security, but in reality, they are defending the interests of the big chemical pesticide companies and industrial farming.

Mr President, recently, Craig Mokhiber, a director at the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, resigned because he said UN leadership had failed in Gaza. They have, he said, ‘shamefully bowed their heads to power’. In his resignation letter, he said, ‘As a human rights lawyer with more than three decades of experience in the field, I know well that the concept of genocide has often been subject to political abuse. But the current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist settler colonial ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs, and coupled with explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli government and military, leaves no room for doubt or debate. In Gaza, homes, schools, churches, mosques and medical institutions are wantonly attacked as thousands of civilians are massacred.’ This, he said, is ‘a textbook case of genocide’. The US and EU are not just complicit in this genocide –they give Israel the arms to carry out their war crimes. The world will never forget that they abandoned the Palestinian people.

Mr President, the vote in the Environment Committee significantly improves the Commission’s proposal, but that was a low bar. This is still far from being a good climate instrument. Despite the improvements, the biggest problem is that the text now actually encourages double claiming between a Member State and a cooperation. That sounds crazy. It is great that we are now proposing to ban offsetting to a large extent, but not all offsetting loopholes have been closed just yet. This regulation has the potential to be hugely positive. It could – and should – be used to facilitate a separate EU carbon removal target, which would facilitate a hugely significant move away from the net-zero basis of EU climate policy. Carbon removals should be a public good. This is a question of climate justice. Removals will be a very limited resource in the near future, and what constitutes so-called unavoidable emissions should not be left to the markets and to those who can pay the most to decide.

Mr President, right to repair needs to be affordable, accessible and mainstream. It also needs to be protected from monopoly practices, so the right to repair needs to guarantee unrestricted access to spare parts and software, to comprehensive information, and to affordable repair services. The regulation should support local, grassroots and community repair initiatives, co-ops and social enterprises. The scope of the regulation in terms of the types of goods covered is still too narrow, but still, there’s a lot to be positive about. However, we can still do much more to tackle consumption. The Parliament’s 2021 report on the 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. Binding EU material-footprint reduction targets would be a game changer. Will the Commission go to that space, Commissioner?

Madam President, the general direction of the net-zero technologies act report isn’t good and is even a significant weakening of the Commission’s proposal, which already left plenty to be desired. The report proposes to give public money to private enterprises with little or no conditions. It says nothing about workers’ rights and conditions. It dilutes the strategic focus we need on wind and solar and on batteries and heat pumps. It expands the list of net-zero technologies in a way that virtually any technology can benefit, including nuclear technology. The report also proposes to permit, in certain circumstances, the placing of industrial clusters, the so-called net zero industrial valleys, in Natura 2000 sites. Of course the EU needs to rapidly speed up the green transition, and of course the EU needs to create good-quality and secure green jobs for workers at home. But let’s not burn our bridges with the rest of the world either.

Madam President, COP conferences are now mostly theatres of climate colonialism, led mainly by corporations, powerful governments of the Global North and elites, where we see a performance of diversion and delay with little or no substance, repeated annually. But the staging of COP in the UAE, one of the biggest oil producers on the planet, a country that is waging war in Yemen and that has an absolutely appalling human rights record, is surely the final straw. We will never tackle the climate crisis if we don’t tackle inequality. Oxfam’s ‘Climate Equality: A planet for the 99%’ report this week says the richest 1% of humanity is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66%. This is the great carbon divide. Limiting the rise in global surface temperatures to 1.5 degrees is only possible by reallocating society’s productive capacity away from enabling the private luxury of a few and austerity for everyone else, and towards wider public prosperity and private sufficiency.

Madam President, the Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted on this day in 1989 by the UN. The US still has not signed it. Israel has killed over 5000 children in the last six weeks, thanks to the support of the US and the EU. American journalist Chris Hedges was in an Al Jazeera studio watching a live feed from Gaza City of Israel attacking al-Shifa Hospital: ‘A deliberate attack on a hospital. A deliberate war crime. A deliberate massacre of the most helpless civilians, including [...] infants. Then the feed goes dead. [...] We know what this means. No power. No water. No internet. No medical supplies. Every infant in an incubator will die. [...] Everyone who needs emergency surgery will die.’ Let there be no doubt Israel, the US and the EU are sending a chilling message to the rest of the world: international and humanitarian law, the Convention on the Rights of the Child are meaningless pieces of paper. They did not apply in Iraq or Afghanistan and they do not apply in Gaza. They do not hate us for our values; maybe they hate us because we do not have any.

Madam President, the headlines are singing the same tune: the war in Ukraine is done; time for negotiations. The best deal Ukraine can hope for is what was on offer in April 2022, when Zelenskyy and the Russians were willing to agree to postpone the Crimea issue, strong federalism or autonomy for eastern Ukraine with language rights – effectively, the platform Zelenskyy was elected on with 73% of the vote. The peace deal in April 2022 was scuppered when Boris Johnson went to Kyiv, threatened Zelenskyy, and promised the EU and US sanctions would cripple Russia in a matter of months. Ukraine is now destroyed. Over 200 000 Ukrainians and Russian soldiers are dead and millions displaced. Russia has overtaken the German economy, and is looking at 2 to 3% growth. Germany is heading for a recession that is having a knock-on effect on the entire EU, where millions are impoverished by inflation and a cost-of-living crisis – a complete and total abject failure by a murderously incompetent EU leadership. When are we going to wake up and cop onto ourselves? We are not serving the interests of the ordinary people of Europe. We’re serving elites, and it’s going to come back to haunt youse.

Madam President, revising the system of own resources for the EU is all about boosting the EU’s budget, ability to respond to growing demands and new crises, and dealing with the repayment of the NextGenerationEU debt. A new common cooperation tax and a financial transaction tax are clearly good things that simply couldn’t function at an individual Member State level. But what will this new basket of own resources be used for? The working people of Europe are on their knees with the cost of living crisis. Will we be helping the people of Europe with this? Very unlikely. We will continue to fill the coffers of the military industrial complex. More and more EU money is going on military spend. The militarisation of Europe is increasing. We could not throw enough money at the war in Ukraine, making sure that didn’t stop, regardless of the number of working-class Russians and Ukrainians dying. We were oblivious to it, but we were promoting a war that suited the US/NATO political agenda, but it has done absolutely nothing for the citizens of Europe. This militarisation of Europe has nothing to offer the people of Europe.

Madam President, there’s probably never been a time where international law and respect for international law has seemed so important, but it’s a huge problem. We were right to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine because it breached the sovereignty of a country. I don’t think we were right, though, to spend billions making sure that it didn’t stop. Our lack of consistency in how we talk about international law is killing the EU’s credibility. We never had a problem and we actually assisted wars of aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and now in Palestine. International law – there’s been collective punishment to cut off the water, fuel and food. They’ve been bombing the place to smithereens. They’ve killed 4 000 children. They’ve killed 10 000 civilians. And you know what? We haven’t been able to condemn Israel. How can we ever talk about international law again?

Madam President, I don’t really recognise the world that this report describes. The values it claims it is based on don’t exist. How can we lecture non-EU countries about human rights and democracy when we go around the world fuelling wars and sanctioning countries to death? How can we pontificate about democracy and human rights when we not only call the fascist apartheid state of Israel a democracy, but are prepared to support it to the point of the genocide of the Palestinian people? Human rights and democracy – these words have lost a lot of meaning when spoken by many European leaders and politicians. Over 10 000 Palestinians murdered, over 4 000 of them children. A textbook case of ethnic cleansing and genocide happening before our eyes, and we can’t even condemn Israel. How can you talk about European democracy and human rights when you outlaw protests and brutalise people protesting about their families being massacred by Israeli bombs? The EU’s credibility is dying.

Mr President, this legislation should be about setting adequate standards to improve public health and save lives. Yet the right-wing groups instead want to limit costs for car manufacturers. It’s estimated that pollution from road transport causes 70 000 premature deaths every year in the EU, as the Commissioner herself highlighted. Yet some groups want to put the interests of big business ahead of the health of the ordinary people of Europe. The Commission proposal already lacked the necessary ambition, but the right wing weakened the text even further at the ENVI Committee. A report by the International Council on Clean Transportation showed that China’s emissions limit values are nearly twice as stringent as the Euro 7 proposal, and the US limits are nearly three times as stringent. The car industry is taking home record profits and paying out massive amounts of money to shareholders. If they wanted to pay for cleaner cars, they quite well could.

Mr President, one of the primary objectives of the Energy Union was to provide clean and affordable energy for the people of Europe. Yet, Irish consumers pay annual energy bills that are about EUR 800 more than the average in the EU. Irish households pay EUR 0.47 per kilowatt-hour for electricity, compared to a European average of EUR 0.26. That’s nearly double the EU average. The EU has pushed the privatisation and liberalisation of the energy sector for decades, promising it would lead to greater efficiency, lower prices and a decarbonised economy. But that’s failed. The pace of decarbonisation is far too slow and the concept of marginal pricing means consumers pay gas prices for renewable energy anyway. And Commissioner, you’re boasting about reducing consumption of Russian gas. But, I mean, we’re buying LNG from America, paying a lot more for it. These are people who’ve dropped more bombs than the rest of the world put together since the end of the Second World War. And we’ve done a gas deal with Israel. With Israel! They’ve just killed 4 000 children ... (The President cut off the speaker)

Madam President, over 4 000 children have been killed by the colonial Israeli regime in one month. Eight times more children have been killed in Gaza in one month than in all of the Ukraine war. Eight times more! And EU leaders are still talking about Israel’s right to defend itself. Defend itself? Is bombing hospitals and churches defending itself? Is bombing refugee camps defending itself? Is slaughtering 4 000 children defending itself? I mean, where are we going? Over 10 000 civilians have been killed in Gaza with EU and US weapons. European white supremacy knows no bounds! A genocide is being carried out by a far-right apartheid Israeli regime, and they are doing so with our unconditional support. It is the EU leaders: not only can you not call for a ceasefire; you can’t mention the words ‘condemn’ and ‘Israel’ in the same sentence. How in God’s name is the EU ever going to talk about human rights anywhere again?

Mr President, the EU’s reliance on imported soya bean is a massive contributor to deforestation and land grabbing in South America. Yet this report doesn’t mention the Mercosur deal once. Facilitating the importation of feed that is 30% cheaper than the likes of Irish-grown feed, and which doesn’t have to adhere to the same EU standards, will put Irish and European grain producers at a massive disadvantage. We need to better support European grain growers. We need to better support Irish grain growers. Tillage farming in Ireland accounts for 50% of all Irish agricultural employment. Yet tillage farmers are treated like second-class citizens as far as farm supports are concerned. Grain markets are down a massive 33% this year. Tillage farmers are being hammered in Ireland this year and it’s nothing new. But it’s also a fact that we urgently need to tackle our overproduction and overconsumption of meat and dairy in Europe. It is not enough to simply substitute the current level of feed imports with production in Europe.

Mr President, we voted against. It doesn’t call for a ceasefire and it doesn’t treat the victims equally. What Hamas did on 7 October was a brutal act of terrorism. Why do our EU leaders find it so difficult to call out the activities of Israel as terrorism? Why are they so reluctant to actually say that Israel is a terrorist state? Why are they so reluctant to say that Israel behaves like an apartheid state and refuses to respect international law? Why does the EU still call Israel its like-minded partner? How can this brutal, lawless regime be our like-minded partner? The truth is that the European Union has been complicit with the war crimes that Israel has been carrying out against the Palestinians for years. There will be no justice for Palestinians as long as the US and the EU continue to support the state terrorism of Israel.

Mr President, when Albin Kurti announced in April that elections would be held in the Serbian-majority municipalities in the north, Serbs said their participation was conditional on Pristina establishing the Community of Serb Municipalities allowed for in the Brussels Agreement first. When there was barely a peep out of the international community that administers Kosovo, Kurti saw this as tacit support and barrelled on ahead anyway. Of course, there is no acknowledgement of Western responsibility in the text. Instead, the resolution lays a lot of blame for what has transpired in the immediate aftermath and since at the feet of Serbia. The Parliament should tread more carefully in these matters. The resolution is not exactly diplomatic. We’re chastising Serbian authorities for making fun of EU policies, criticising them for relations with other countries, and warning the Commission against appeasement towards Serbia. There’s little wonder that in 2022, just 22% of Serbs polled said they supported EU accession. This is not constructive behaviour and we couldn’t support it.

Mr President, key tenants of the social economy, investing profit into social objectives, promoting good environmental practices, as well as acting as a vehicle to include women, the disadvantaged and under-represented groups into the labour market, are elements that should be part of our economy as the norm. In Ireland, a cost-benefit analysis has found that for every euro invested in training and upskilling social economy workers, there’s a return of almost three euros. However, this model can make it difficult for social enterprises to access normal streams of funding, and workers have different upskilling needs compared to the rest of the economy. This legislation is a good start, but there’s a long way to go. Member States need to adapt existing business supports to fit the social economy and increase public investment in social infrastructure, for the people and for the planet.

Madam President, fur farming is deeply cruel. It’s also bad for biodiversity as mink is an invasive species in Europe. We want to see a ban on fur farming in the EU, and we want to see a ban on farmed fur products, but this should not be the limit of our ambition in terms of animal welfare reforms. In the Farm to Fork Strategy, the Commission promised that it would propose a revision of the EU’s animal welfare legislation by the end of this year. The Commission revealed its work programme this week. The proposal on the transport of animals is the only one of the four animal welfare regulations the Commission promised to revise that it has actually included. The promised proposal to transition to cage-free systems is completely absent. These broken promises show a complete disregard not only for animal welfare and well-being, but also for participatory democracy. For fuck’s sake, let's get rid of fur farming!

Madam President, over 3 000 Palestinians have been killed and 10 000 wounded in 11 days. Over 1 000 children murdered. The Israeli government has been targeting network installations and 2.3 million people are struggling to reach the outside world, their relatives. Anyone with a shred of humanity is trying to raise awareness of Israeli war crimes. And what’s the response of Europe? Banning public protest, outlawing Palestinian flags and scarves, criminalising compassion and solidarity with the oppressed, beating and arresting desperate, powerless immigrants who took to the streets because their entire families have been obliterated by Israeli airstrikes. We issued threats to online platforms that intentionally conflated illegal content with disinformation, and pushed for swift removal at the expense of due diligence. This will lead to preventive over-blocking of legal content, silencing the voices of besieged Palestinians. Meanwhile, a torrent of lies and genocidal hate speech from Israel is promoted and amplified. Do we really have an appetite for the truth, or is this just our own version of it?

Madam President, when Israeli snipers intentionally shot and killed Shireen Abu Akleh in May last year, she joined over 20 other journalists martyred by the Israeli regime since 2001. No one has faced any accountability for these murders. The courageous Daphne Caruana Galizia, whose memory we are honouring today, would be calling for accountability for these murders. She couldn’t understand why her own corrupt government supported Israel, stating they were always on the side of the oppressor. What would she make of the EU’s complicity with, and support for, the oppressor today? In the last 11 days, the Israelis have murdered 11 Palestinian journalists and one Lebanese. Nine have been murdered by Israeli airstrikes; three shot dead by the Israeli Defence Forces. We are here talking about the need to protect journalists. Surely we need to protect all journalists.

Mr President, President Murphy, when you published your annual report on 5 October, you also published your opinion on the establishment of the Ukraine facility – an impressive document, despite the fact that you were limited in providing a fully informed opinion, given that the Commission refused to prepare an impact assessment. You point out in Section 34 that given the level of grand corruption in Ukraine, ‘the sustainability of the Commission's interventions and support for reforms is constantly under threat.’ And you said that ‘it is unclear from the proposal how the Commission intends to ensure that this risk will be mitigated.’ In Section 56, you point out that your 2021 report on Ukraine found that ‘oligarchs and vested interests were the root cause of corruption in Ukraine’, and that ‘this highlights a systemic risk for the Ukraine facility’. I'd like to know, Mr Murphy, if the Commission are actually taking your concerns on board, especially given the fact that we've thrown an awful lot of European taxpayers’ money at a country at war, and we're doing nothing to stop the war, and we're actually planning on spending another EUR 20 billion on military aid to make sure the war doesn't stop. Do you think this is a good investment for money?

Mr President, it’s a fact that Pegasus spyware was battle-tested on civilians and human rights activists in Palestine. The Occupied Territories are some of the most surveilled places on earth. For Israeli companies engaged in developing spyware, the Occupied Territories have always been a laboratory where their products can be tested before being marketed and exported around the world for profit. Spyware is a tool of control, and the NSO Group is an arm of the Israeli State. You said, Commissioner, that even where spyware is used in connection with national security, there have to be checks and balances. But we know that will always be abused, and this is abuse of spyware. All of the intelligence and data scraped from this surveillance will – now more than ever – be used to punish innocent Palestinians. Israel is right now committing war crimes against Palestinian civilians. It’s engaging in collective punishment of an innocent people. And I have to say, it is still shocking that our President von der Leyen went there to say that she stood by what Israel was doing. It’s a bad reflection on the EU. It brings it into disrepute that she still has her job.

Mr President, the latest drinking water quality report by the Environmental Protection Agency in Ireland says nearly half a million people in Ireland get their water from ‘at-risk’ supplies. The report is hugely critical of the fact that Irish Water has no upgrade or improvement plan, with completion dates for 18 of the 58 water supplies on its remedial action list. There was a total of 79 boil water notices and 10 water restrictions in place in Ireland in 2022, affecting over 190 000 people. The report also highlights serious concerns over the pace of progress in removing lead piping from the public drinking water network. The EPA says that, at the current pace, it will take another 10 years to get rid of all the lead piping. Water infrastructure in Ireland has suffered dramatically from massive underfunding for decades. Greater investment is required and the cost burden should not fall on households. We should never forget that water is a human right and not something for profit.