Colm Brophy (Dublin South West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Yes. I disagree respectfully with Senator Chambers on this. That process is coming from a viewpoint of dissolving the European Union as it currently exists. That is effectively the Franco-German proposal. It is not a marginal proposal. It should not be welcomed. It proposes three tiers. They call them rings because tiers obviously upset them. This is a dusting down of a Macron proposal of a number of years ago, dressed up and repackaged through an independent set of academics to re-present it. At its heart, it tells member states like Ireland they are not worthy of being at the top table and that small countries will not hold the main commissionerships. Our farmers and community groups will be disadvantaged. Our sectoral interests will no longer have the same access to Europe as they have now. I am open to looking at how to handle enlargement and development of the European Union but I urge the Minister of State that a proposal as fundamentally wrong as this one not be entertained. It would destroy Ireland’s ability to be a full member of the European Union, along with most smaller member states. That is fundamentally different from changes around qualified majority voting or tweaks to the system.

I urge the European Union collectively and the governments within it to recognise that if we spend the next five years looking at our internal structures and park the enlargement for another five years, what has been mentioned by a number of members here will happen. Young people and those in their 40s who have grown up their entire life looking at whether or not they could gain access to the European Union will move away and look through their political representatives and their countries’ governments at other avenues of involvement. That opens up the door to Russia and other players. While there are risks and the rule of law must be at the heart of it, we as the European Union need to recognise and I urge the Minister of State to ensure the Government uses its position to say priority one is enlargement and if changes have to be made, they are to be made at the same time or afterwards, but not to use an internal look at our processes to delay enlargement by another decade.