Speeches

Madam President, I would like to commend the Commissioner for the good work on the Nature Restoration Law. God knows it’s not easy making progress on climate and environmental ambition in this place. To start, the 55% reduction target in the EU climate law that Parliament passed two years ago is too low given the EU’s historical contribution to global rising temperatures and the EU’s capacity to reduce its emissions. Global temperature simply cannot be limited to a 1.5 degree increase if this remains the ceiling of the EU’s ambition. Today we passed the Nature Restoration Law. I am delighted that the regulation lives to fight another day. In that sense, it’s a good day for the people of the EU, for nature and for farmers in particular. But the text passed by Parliament today, as you know, has been gutted. It’s a shell of the Commission’s proposal. Parliament voted to delete the entire article on agricultural ecosystems. It voted to restrict restoration measures for terrestrial ecosystems to Natura 2000 protected areas only. Let’s hope we can fix some of these problems in trilogue. It will be a big challenge.

Mr President, it’s well established that shell companies are used by corporations to shift and hide billions in wealth and profits every year within the EU, costing EU taxpayers over EUR 60 billion every year. Parliament has already voted overwhelmingly in favour of implementing the Unshell Directive, and despite the Swedish Presidency watering down the text to near non—recognition, it is still blocked at Council level. So what’s the holdup? Who was actually holding it up? We have a text that’s supposed to bring transparency to financial secrecy. Where’s the transparency from the Council? As Paul Tang said, we have a fair idea of which countries are supporting the directive, but which ones are not? We need this text adopted as a matter of urgency. Will the Spanish Presidency put Unshell on the agenda of the next meeting of the finance ministers? Is there any chance to have it live—streamed, or will the Council continue to operate like a secret society?

Mr President, you have always said that you respect the fact that people sit through the debate. I’ve been here since before you started and you’ve let in a speaker that came in ten minutes before he spoke. As far as we’re concerned, you are censoring us! You are not allowing us to speak. I’ve been here before you were here. I was here before the debate started. Why won’t you let me in, please?

Mr President, the EU Chips Act will involve a massive transfer of public subsidies to private corporations without a guaranteed fair return on investment for society or conditionalities on public funding. Industrial policy can work to improve livelihoods and benefit the population, but this Act won’t do that. Additionally, there is a threat that this will lead to a further move away from trade with China. There is a global struggle for control of chip manufacturing, with export controls on US chips to China and a retaliatory restriction on the export of raw materials from China to the US. Our biases here have been exposed by the fact that the Commission has flagged the Chinese export conditions as potential violations of the so-called rules-based international order, while no such accusations have been levelled at the US. And, as my colleague said, these rules-based international orders are something the US make up as they go along – sadly, with our support. The EU Chips Act thankfully does not go down the US path of hitting China with export controls, though the text leaves room for this possibility in the future. In all of this, it’s vital that the EU forges an independent path. An eye for an eye only leaves everyone blind. And just one word to the Commissioner: I want to compliment the Commissioner on all the work he has done on trying to get nature restoration across the line against the absolute madness of what’s gone on in this House for months. Fair play to you, because it has been crazy!

Mr President, Commissioner, this report supports the EIB’s financial support for European security and defence. It specifically welcomes the EIB Strategic European Security Initiative. That initiative commits up to EUR 6 billion to dual use projects seeking to develop security and defence systems. The report even calls on the EIB to expand the initiative and to increase its investments in European security and defence. The European Parliament is now complicit in the relentless attempts by the Council, the Commission, the European Defence Agency, as well as the arms industry, to undermine the restrictions that prevent the EIB from investing in arms and core defence projects. In its 2022 roadmap on critical technologies for security and defence, the Commission lamented the fact that the EIB’s lending policies still had restrictions that prevent it from lending to the defence sector. The EIB should have nothing to do with the arms industry and this is a serious indicator of where it’s going, and it’s not good.

Madam President, there is a paternalistic logic underpinning accession to the EU: supposedly ‘primitive’ countries must catch up to the more advanced’ Western European countries and incorporate EU values. These Commission reports talk about a fantasy world where Western interference is erased. Corruption, abysmal social safety nets, crumbling infrastructure and inequality of outcome must be addressed, but let’s not talk about the string of leaders vetted by the West who allowed the market to rip through Albania’s most valuable assets, who scrapped laws that protected workers rights and social security programmes, who prioritised the foreign direct investment that crushed local industry and facilitated what can only be called the theft of state properties that went to Western investors for a pittance! The drive towards accession in the aftermath of the pillage drives politics in Albania in just one direction. There is no vision, there is endless vague talk of corruption while no one addresses the plight of the people or wealth redistribution. Dissatisfaction and protests are growing.

Madam President, Bosnia and Herzegovina is severely hampered by the deep structural issues stemming from the fundamental principles of the Dayton Peace Agreement, the neocolonial institution of the High Representative, who can dismiss the complete lack of positive or economic and social development and the dramatically high levels of immigration from both sub-entities. The report has very little in it to address these structural issues. It defends the Dayton Agreement and pours fuel on the already tense situation regarding relations with neighbouring states. We know that the issue of NATO and Russia is extremely divisive, and yet the report calls on political actors to condemn Russia, impose sanctions and advance NATO membership. The harder the EU pushes on the line, the more pronounced the disputes between the ethno-national confederations in Bosnia and Herzegovina will become.

Madam President, for more than two days last week, the Israeli Defence Forces attacked the Jenin refugee camp in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank. Benjamin Netanyahu labelled the attack on one of the world’s most defenceless and impoverished areas a special operation. It reminds one of Russia’s special military operations in Ukraine, which we rightly condemned. But where’s the condemnation of Israel? As reported by the excellent Jeffrey St Clair, the IDF targeted Jenin’s entire population and the fragile infrastructure the camp depends on for its survival: power plants, pipelines, electrical lines, cell towers, sewage treatment facilities, roads, schools, mosques and clinics. When the UN is helpless and the Palestinian Authority – which is responsible for security in the Occupied Territories – acts as a subcontractor for the Israeli state, serving only to police Palestinians and not secure them from external attack, is it any wonder paramilitaries have risen up to defend neighbourhoods and families against such blood-soaked incursions? The Israeli treatment of Palestinians is barbaric and the EU is complicit.

Madam President, if we were serious about addressing the transport problems from a congestion point of view, from a resource point to view, from an environmental point of view, how in God’s name have we not done more to advance the rail project? You go around any country in Europe and you’ll see a rail track that’s not even being used, that’s actually been closed down. I see it in Ireland. I see it in Italy. I see rail in France that’s not being used. OK, we made improvements between some of the big cities with some fast track, but very little of it. China has built 30 000 km of fast—track rail. Now Europe has only a fraction of that because we don’t seem to have had the appetite for it. It’s a no—brainer from the environmental point of view. But yet we’re not going there: if we’re serious about it, we seem to be able to do what we really want to do when we set up a task of doing it. But we haven’t done it with rail and it’s madness.

Mr President, firstly, thanks to César and his staff for their great work on the legislation. The threat of global biodiversity collapse is real. The scientific consensus is that if we do not take dramatic action within the next decade, we may face irreversible damage to the natural world and the collapse of our societies. The science is absolutely clear: the biggest threat to our food security, to the future of agriculture, to the very persistence of humanity are the climate and biodiversity crises. The nature restoration law can help to address both. Last week in Piemonte, in Italia, there was unprecedented damage to grapevines and hazelnuts. In some cases, total crops were wiped out by hazelnuts bigger than golf balls and it was 30 degrees. The nature restoration law is not perfect. It will not radically alter our utterly broken economic system, which depends on perpetual extraction of finite resources to fuel infinite expansion. And, unfortunately, any Parliament text we end up with after the vote this week is likely to be quite a bit weaker than the Commission’s proposal. It won’t be ideal, but I am hopeful that after the negotiations with the Council we will have a legal framework that is workable and that sufficiently addresses the biodiversity crisis. Our future depends on it. The nature restoration law is an existential necessity.

Madam President, the Irish fishing industry is predicted to lose EUR 43 million worth of quota share by 2026 under the EU-UK free trade agreement. This will amount to a 15% reduction in the overall value of Irish fish quotas compared to 2020. Ireland was proportionally massively more impacted by the Brexit agreement than any other Member State. The upcoming review of the common fisheries policy must address the hugely disproportionate impact of Brexit on the Irish fishing industry, including these imbalances in the quota transfers. But it also needs to increase Irish quota shares overall. Let’s not forget: the common fisheries policy shafted Irish fishermen right from the start. The CFP allows foreign boats to catch up to 85% of the fish in Irish waters. Yet Irish boats get no reciprocal access to the waters of other Member States. It looks like the EU solidarity is in short supply for Ireland’s fishing communities.

Madam President, firstly, to debunk one of the key myths about this European Citizens’ Initiative, there have been claims that this proposal will be harmful and limiting to medical research with an outright ban on animal testing, which is untrue. Despite the ban on animal testing on cosmetic products it is an ongoing practice with certain ingredients that require testing by the European Chemicals Agency. This initiative outlines a clear consumer demand to reduce mandatory chemical testing, with a proposal to transform and innovate EU chemicals regulation to ensure that human health and the environment are protected by managing chemicals without the barrier of new animal testing requirements, as outlined in a report by the European Environment Bureau. This needs to be achieved through REACH regulation, which is responsible for testing requirements. So the revision of REACH legislation is crucial. But when will it happen? The Commission has been promising this for a while.

Mr President, freedom of the press, of association and freedom of expression are the cornerstones of any healthy political system. Some MEPs in here have said that journalists are afraid to report the truth and they’re right. Pablo Gonzalez, a Basque journalist, is in prison for the last 16 months in Poland because the authorities didn’t like what he was saying. Algirdas Paleckis is in prison in Lithuania. His crime: he was considered pro-Russian. Julian Assange: five years in Belmarsh high—security prison in London. For what? For telling the truth about US and NATO war crimes. What are we doing about saving him? Meanwhile, most of our mainstream media in Europe have been bought by US empire, so most of our journalists are actually being paid not to speak the truth. They’ve been bought. Our media in Europe is in serious trouble. Independent media is almost non-existent today.

Madam President, in order to respond to the current climate, health and biodiversity crises, it is crucial that the EU tackles the pollution coming from Europe’s most industrialised livestock farms. These farms represent a tiny minority of animal farms in Europe. Contrary to the false claims made by the big-agri lobby, the Industrial Emissions Directive does not target small and medium family farms. And this is particularly true for the cattle sector. 97 % of all commercial cattle farms in Europe would be untouched by the revised directive. Excluding the entire cattle sector from the Industrial Emissions Directive would only favour the biggest polluters, responsible for the vast majority of ammonia and methane emissions coming from cattle farming. Ireland has lost 140 000 family farms since the 1970s, largely due to the intensification and consolidation of farming in the country. Small-scale family farms are the backbone of food production in Europe. It is about time we supported them and stopped prioritising big agri, which is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Mr President, the recent report on human rights in Nicaragua makes a series of allegations and grave ones against the Nicaraguan Government, and these should be taken very seriously. But if you actually care about the people of Nicaragua, we wouldn’t be sanctioning them because sanctions hurt the ordinary people the most. I would like to commend Mr Borrell for going to Cuba, but I don’t understand why he can’t have as good an attitude to Nicaragua. Instead of demonising Nicaragua, we should engage with them and show them some respect and we might make some more progress. We engage with Cuba, a country that excels in the field of medicine, health care, sustainable agriculture and education. Recently, Cuba has been going through a series of political reforms, democratic participation in the March legislative elections was higher than most EU countries could possibly achieve, and in September, the population voted to approve the most progressive family code in the world. But Cuba’s biggest challenge is US sanctions. And I wish Mr Borrell would challenge those US sanctions, which have gone on for over 60 years and are illegal and violent.

Mr President, brutal regimes who torture, murder, execute and bomb people on a daily basis. The Israelis, the US, the Saudis, for example. They are our business partners, so we don’t care what they do. Countries that resist Western imperialism, who fight back against regime-change operations or even overthrow Western puppet regimes, countries like Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Yemen, Syria, Palestine. These countries we attack. The US, NATO and their partners when not bombing these countries are strangling them to death. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of people are dying each year from illegal Western sanctions and embargoes, from lack of access to medicine and functional infrastructure. The hostility against Iran is intense. Iranian scientists are assassinated by Israelis. The US drone bombed the revered General Soleimani, the man who did most of defeat ISIS in Iraq. Infrastructure is targeted and destroyed. The Israelis routinely blow up oil tankers destined for other sanctioned countries. The US imprisons individuals suspected of violating their illegal sanctions against Iran, taking them hostages. The US wouldn’t even relax the sanctions regime during the Covid-19 crisis. Weapons are being smuggled into Iran to arm forces hostile to the government. You could possibly understand the Iranian Government’s paranoia about spies and infiltrators. The murder of Palestinians, the bombing and starving of Yemenis, the beheading and the brutal treatment of women in Saudi Arabia, Syrians dying from cholera. This meets silence. But for Iran, we pass countless resolutions about every human rights violation, real or imagined. We call for sanctions while engaging in unhinged, blatant racist discourse. The groups are calling for a special task force to deal with so-called hostile foreign regimes. What you need to do is stop being hostile to foreign governments. You need to stop promoting NATO lies and stop interfering in other countries, stop behaving like colonialists. Because we don’t use our platform to parrot narrow talking points, this allowed us to be instrumental in securing the release of Irishman Bernard Phelan from an Iranian prison on humanitarian grounds last month. This is what is possible if you engage with countries in a spirit of mutual respect. Iran wants normal relations with the West. That is what the entire JCPOA deal was about. It was the US who did not want normal relations with Iran. That the EU has sat by and let things deteriorate to this point is an indictment of the concept of European diplomacy, as is their failure to look for peace in the war in Ukraine because it does not suit US-NATO.

Mr President, the biggest risk to food security and to the long-term resilience of EU agriculture are climate change and the biodiversity crisis. Never has our food system be so industrialised, so chemically intensive, and so global. This is the primary driver of the biodiversity crisis and a massive contributor to the climate crisis. We are approaching the sixth mass extinction. Global greenhouse gas emissions are at an all-time high. Yet the EPP walked out of negotiations on the Nature Restoration Law and are actively engaging in disinformation about the content of the regulation. The EPP has repeatedly lied that the regulation would force farmers to abandon 10 % of their farmland. This is not true. Nowhere in the Commission proposal or in Parliament’s text is this stated and it is pretty irresponsible to suggest otherwise. History will not be kind to those who vote against the Nature Restoration Law.

Mr President, without proper regulation, AI systems will further increase mass surveillance, structural discrimination, the centralised power of Big Tech and unaccountable public decision-making. The regulation should be governed by a precautionary principle, but the text we voted on today did not include this. It does not ban the use of AI in migration management. The understanding of what is considered high risk was severely watered down. The committee bans discriminatory biometric categorisation, predictive policing, emotive recognition and the mass scraping of images. But the regulation should also ban the automated surveillance of behaviour in public spaces. France is about to introduce this kind of behavioural surveillance in order to alert police to so-called abnormal behaviour at sports events. For decades, football fans have had to live with political policing and inhumane treatment by police simply because they are working class, especially the fans who either sit or stand behind the goals. They deserve better.

Mr President, I’ve lost count of the number of times that we’ve discussed Hong Kong and here. I’m surprised that you’re still not giving out about the protests in the place and the treatment of the protesters. Maybe it’s because only one protester was killed in two years and he wasn’t killed by the Chinese police. China got Hong Kong back from the Brits in 1997. Hong Kong had never known anything remotely close to democracy under the Brits. It was an empire. There was a colonial empire and a fairly brutal one. And the idea that we have the right to lecture China about what’s going on in Hong Kong. Who, in God’s name, are we to be lecturing anybody ? Why don’t we actually sort out things in our own place? We are so fond of interfering in other people’s business. We were in China for ten days and we didn’t go on an official mission in April, you know what, and it was such an impressive country and such an impressive people. You know what? We should learn to be a bit more tolerant of other cultures and other nations and stop being judgmental and thinking that we are the only ones with values.

Madam President, (start of speech off mic) ... EU Council when they decide to inflict sanctions on an entity does not adhere to basic standards of due process. No evidence is presented. The accused body does not get a defence and it all happens in secret. At least Ireland had its show trials in public. There’s nothing in customary international law that allows for a legal basis for the way our EU sanctions mechanism functions, our unilateral coercive measures regime. High Representative Josep Borrell is clear on this: he said our sanctions are a means of coercive capacity. The illegal nature of unilateral coercive measures has been repeatedly affirmed in numerous resolutions of the UN Human Rights Council and the UN General Assembly. The rule of law has been thrown out the window and is being replaced with the law of the jungle. What is more, sanctions are a weapon of mass murder. The Council should not be extending the mandate of the European Public Prosecutor’s Office to enforce their illegitimate pronouncements.

Madam President, there is a lot that is positive in this report – fair play to Petros and Udo. Paragraph 77 demands reforms in the methodology of measuring economic performance so that progress is based on the well-being of people and of the planet. Paragraph 78 calls on the Commission to develop beyond-GDP indicators that incorporate societal and environmental factors. It is heartening to see a growing interest in alternative measures of economic progress. However, the report ignores the fundamental problem with the SDGs themselves. Goal eight of this of the Sustainable Development Goals calls for continued global economic growth equivalent to 3% per year to achieve the human development objectives. Of course, regional development in the Global South needs to continue, but surely not in the developed north. Global economic growth is incompatible with environmental protection targets. We need to reject the endless growth imperative for the good of the people and the planet.

Madam President, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists should be commended for their work on the Pandora Papers. On their website on the Papers, the ICIJ lists who they consider the power players of the Pandora Papers. They include, unsurprisingly, President Putin and his inner circle, but they also include the current Ukrainian President, Zelenskyy. The ICIJ describes Zelenskyy’s activities as follows: ‘Zelenskyy owned shares in an anonymous offshore entity, as did some of his business partners who are now close political allies.’ The report recommends that investigations into the assets and investments of Russian oligarchs should be a top priority, as they are strategically important for the EU’s security. Maybe the report should also consider investigations into the powers that be in Ukraine in order to ascertain how they attained their vast wealth and power.

Madam President, thank you. Commissioner, you spoke of the need to invest well to strengthen our economies. In Ireland, a lot of companies can’t find enough workers because the workers can’t get accommodation because we have a housing crisis, because successive governments have refused to invest in public housing. Now, to fix the housing crisis in Ireland, we do need direct provision of public housing by the state using public lands with rents and public housing linked to income. We’ve been subsidising landlords, developers and investors to provide housing for decades, and the results are spiralling rents and housing costs, chronic homelessness and ageing and crumbling housing stock, land banking and a gaping housing shortage. Now to put the rights of people before the profits of capitalist elites, we’d need a change to European State aid rules because they don’t allow states to increase investment in the delivery of public housing. What good is the EU to the people of Europe when it provides protections for profiteers and actively blocks states from providing housing for their own people?

Mr President, we welcome the report on the use of Pegasus. It makes for shocking, but not surprising, reading on the actions of the apartheid state of Israel and the use of Pegasus software as a matter of diplomacy, with the report highlighting how the sale of Pegasus software is used as a diplomatic bargaining chip, with countries turning a blind eye to Israel’s actions domestically. The report also highlights how numerous EU Member States fully engaged in the industry. On my own country, Ireland, the report states, ‘Ireland offers favourable fiscal arrangements to a large spyware vendor’. If we’re serious about strictly regulating the use and trade of spyware, we must first start in our own backyard and ensure that EU Member States are prevented from promoting and profiteering from a product that essentially amounts to mass surveillance.

Mr President, in Nicaragua in 2018, there was a violent coup attempt carried out by the anti-Sandinista protestors. The government responded violently. Many church leaders encouraged the protests and called on Ortega to resign. Of the 253 people killed, 48 were confirmed as Sandinistas, 22 were police officers, 31 protesters, and the political affiliation of the remaining 152 was unknown. It’s estimated that 140 of the deaths occurred at the hundreds of roadblocks set up by the protesters. The recent report on human rights in Nicaragua makes a series of grave allegations against the Nicaraguan Government about the response to the protests and the prosecution of those deemed responsible. These claims need to be taken seriously, but the calls for further sanctions in the report will not help achieve justice for what has transpired. If we care about the human rights of Nicaraguans, we’ll call for the existing punitive sanctions to be lifted to pave the way for the restoration of dialogue between wrong parties and to facilitate access to justice.