Eoin Hayes (Dublin Bay South, Social Democrats)

I am conscious there are only about five minutes left. I will focus on Mr. McGeady. If we think about the EU functions and what the purpose of the EU was for so long, it was initially a trade union. Certain regulations came into that.

It has been a Union that upholds human rights to some degree and it has had responsibility for capital markets. We are also seeing movement towards defence becoming a competence of the European Union. In that context, there are what I would call missing pillars. Social programmes are missing. We do not really talk about housing at a European level, healthcare across the European Union or, with regard to the fiscal union, how transfers should occur between the core and the periphery to sustain things like the SDGs. There is a question as to how we embed the SDGs into the EU's functions, how we talk about that and what the pathway towards it is. Related to that is the question of accountability for not meeting SDGs. One of my criticisms of legislation more generally is that we often talk about monitoring things but we never talk about the consequences for not hitting goals or improving against certain metrics. Would the witnesses like to offer any commentary on embedding enforcement mechanisms in respect of the SDGs in the institutions or functions of the European Union that they would like to see put front and centre during the Irish Presidency or beyond it?