Ivana Bacik (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Dr. Devine for her very stimulating presentation and giving us the opportunity to engage with her on this important question. There are many issues and a great many implications of Brexit for Irish foreign policy. As she said, she is really just touching on some of them in her paper. It is interesting that she emphasises the flaws in EU governance and the implications of EU membership for Irish neutrality. I would disagree with her or take issue with some of her statements, as she might have expected. I could not accept that military neutrality for Ireland has been eradicated and most Irish people would be slightly horrified to take that view. Ireland is and remains a neutral country, and we are not the only neutral country in the EU.

Forgive me if I have misinterpreted Dr. Devine's comments but I understood her to say that while the UK has been a member of the EU, it has effectively amounted to being a defender of Ireland's neutrality. I cannot accept that but perhaps I misunderstood the witness. It is not right to see the EU as a sort of monolithic entity. The EU is clearly an amalgam of member states with very different approaches to issues around neutrality and foreign policy. We are one of the EU member states in that way. On the left, many of us have struggled with a view of Europe and we have been very critical of aspects of European governance, particularly the "Fortress Europe" mentality and the way in which the EU failed abjectly to come up with a way of welcoming refugees from war-torn countries like Syria and so on. I am absolutely in agreement with Dr. Devine on the critique I imagine she might make in that regard. However, given the changed political climate in the past year internationally, with President Trump in the US, the growing power and dominance of Mr. Putin in Russia and the major fear that many citizens in EU member states in central and eastern Europe are feeling about EU encroachment, as we have seen with Georgia, I am very concerned. We need to start acknowledging the EU can be a very progressive force and counterbalance to the growing might of the US and Russia, with very authoritarian regimes now in place in both those countries. The EU is seen by many across the world, notably in Syria and other war-torn countries, as a bastion of democracy.

There is another articulation of EU values that is true. I agree with much of Dr. Devine's critique but we must also acknowledge there are many other impetuses at work within the EU. Many of us are highly critical of Chancellor Merkel's policies in many ways but nonetheless all of us respect the way in which Germany took in 1 million Syrian refugees and tried to encourage EU member states to take a similarly welcoming approach to policy to refugees. I am sorry to go on but I feel passionately about this. My own family background is from the Czech Republic and I also have family in Croatia. As many on the left did, I grappled with the concept of military intervention in the war in Bosnia. I now believe it unfortunate the EU did not intervene more strongly in that appalling war and genocide, particularly when we saw the treatment of the Bosnian people in particular. We must be careful about assuming certain monolithic ideas about Europe. We must acknowledge it is more complex or nuanced than that. The EU can and should in many ways form a counter-power to authoritarian regimes that we can see in place in the US and Russia.