Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I support my colleague, Deputy Brophy, on the renationalisation of supports for agriculture. That would be a disaster for this country and for all other small countries throughout the European Union. The purpose of the CAP was to level off, provide food for a growing population in Europe, and provide continuity of supply at a high standard. That has worked very well. To go off on a tangent and decide that each country should support itself would be an appalling short-term policy disaster. As time goes on, if we mention that often enough, someone will take us up and tell us that if we want that kind of thing, we will get it. We should be very careful about that.

This country has benefited greatly from membership of the European Union under virtually every pillar. Successive Governments have used the money well. There will always be people who say it should have been done better or there should have been more emphasis on something else. That is the way it always was and will be. Speaking from memory, our gross domestic product, GDP, in 1988 was way below the average in the European Union, which in turn was way below that of the United States. The European Free Trade Association, EFTA, countries at that time were well ahead of us with an income per capitathree times that of ours. There has been a transformation in this country in the meantime. We do not notice things that are going well and we do not seem to emphasise them. They did well, however, and the country did well as a result with the support we got from the European Union, albeit in return for payments into the European funds. We got more back. That is the purpose of the European Union, to bring the level of development within the Union up to a certain standard so that the Union became more efficient, more self-sufficient and fairer. It has done that.

Sometimes I hear versions of the common consolidated corporate tax base, CCCTB, as being of benefit to Ireland and so on. Everything is of benefit provided everybody does it and recognises what happens. It is like the financial transaction tax, the Tobin tax. Everybody in this country will say it is a great idea and that we should get a fair chunk of tax from all those wealthy transactions.

It is of no benefit to us, however, unless everybody across the globe does it, for the simple reason that those who will gain most from it will gain more than they ever did before by virtue of scale. We need to be very cautious about how far we go down the road and that we do not find ourselves collecting taxes, for instance, on profits made by multinational corporations in other European member states and non-member states. That is one of the things looming ahead of us. There is a court case pending in respect of Apple at present. We have to look after our own business to the best of our ability. That means we need to be treated fairly and we need to recognise that everybody is entitled to be treated fairly as well. To go off on a tangent with some idea that we are alone in this is not useful.

There is a growing notion across some European countries that going back to the old ways and days might be better than what we have experienced over the past years. That is a load of rubbish and anybody who has learned about European history, as I am sure everybody here has, will know that over 1,000 years, the biggest single peace initiative ever on the globe was the European Union. I think we take it for granted. It has little hiccups from time to time but it is still without any shadow of doubt the biggest single barrier to war. It is not many years back that 60 million people died in the last major conflict. The European Union has done a lot. Its focus has moved away from that but we do need to be careful that we do not start improving the roundness of the wheel. There are always a few people around who think they can do that. It started off as a rough multi-angular shape and then it became a round wheel. Several people since then have tried to make the wheel more perfect in its roundness but it does not happen that way and will never work. We need to recognise that we are all in the European Union for a purpose, namely, to bring ourselves along together, support each other and recognise that together we go forward and united we stand.