Ms Niamh Ní Bhriain:

On the emergency dimension, Article 122, as far as I know, was used to activate an emergency response to Covid, which is understandable. Most countries were activating emergency responses but they were not to use a massive amount of money to draw down loans that would be backstopped by the European Union's public budget. The legality of using that article broke very dangerous ground in the context of it being used for something that is not really justified. Even the Parliament agrees. I would often disagree with a lot of what comes out of the European Parliament, but even the it agrees that the legality of using this is not sound.

The funding for other dimensions of life such as social cohesion projects, which are now going to be regenerated, will now also go into defence or war. That was one of the main criticisms of what is proposed. We are at a moment when there is crumbling public infrastructure across many European Union countries, when housing is a massive problem and there are difficulties with hospitals and healthcare systems in the context of ageing populations. At no point has the European Union used anything similar to this to roll out €800 billion at the drop of a hat. It would be great if Ursula von der Leyen came to the podium at a press conference tomorrow and said, "Here we are - €800 billion for housing". That would be great, but it has not happened and is not going to happen. Housing is one of the biggest problems facing countries in Europe at the moment, and not least Ireland.

On joint procurement, this is something that one would see very often in the arms trade in the way the latter works. Consider a drone. Turkey is an example whereby we at one point tracked how a drone is actually made. Components were coming from Britain, France and Germany. They were all being exported to Turkey and the drones were being assembled there. There is a massive drone industry in Turkey. There is also one in Israel. Often, no one country will ever produce everything that is needed to make an armament. In the context of the arms industry, therefore, this kind of joint procurement necessarily lends itself to a process of building weapons that are more easily built if you have all of these partnerships in place. Often, the one that is championed as the example to follow is the F-35 fighter jet. As we know, these jets are being used to bombard Gaza right now. The F-35 is a US fighter jet, but it is fitted out using lots of European components. For example, the Netherlands exports a significant number of F-35 components. They were being sent directly to Israel but that was stopped because there was a court case in the Netherlands. However, I do not need to get into that. I mention the example of the F-35 because to get one of these jets built, companies will be building specific armaments or items of weaponry in different countries.

From the point of view of the arms industry, this whole fund has been built on the advice of the arms companies. This is written into the White Paper for European Defence - Readiness 2030. There is a strategic dialogue with what is referred to as the defence industry. They have been pushing for these joint procurement measures for years because it is much more fluid then to have the ability to build weaponry if such measures are in place.

One of the really problematic dimensions to this fund is that it is split such that 65% of the components for the weaponry systems and the procurement can come from within Europe and 35% from a third country. That can be any third country. It could be Israel, for example. We are setting ourselves up to spend massive amounts of money - of around €150 billion - in circumstances where, as a result of the procurement mechanisms, 35% of the components that go into building weaponry systems could be going to Israel. There is no restriction on the countries that are not part of the core group. This is really worrying.