Ms Niamh Ní Bhriain:

I will come in on where the money comes from. This is the White Paper on defence readiness 2030. It sets out a five-pillar plan for where the money would come from for the €800 billion fund. Today, we are only discussing €150 billion of that, which is the SAFE fund. That is the money that will be drawn down in loans. The other dimension of that is another part of the pillar which goes under an umbrella term, which is flexing existing EU instruments such as the Cohesion Fund. That is the other dimension of today's discussion. That is another one of the pillars, that they would be flexing the just transition fund, the Cohesion Fund and all of those. The other three pillars are about activating the national escape clause, contributions from the European Investment Bank and also mobilising private capital. That is the European Union's five-pillar plan for where the money would come from.

We will come to the issue of where the money will go, but again it is this idea that you can just pull €800 billion out of the sky. In terms of social cohesion, it is money that would often go to the periphery. There is this idea that there are periphery zones in Europe that could benefit from further investment but that this money would be funnelled into building military systems and war and all of that. That is very clearly laid out. A new document was published online and I was looking at it before I came to the meeting. The regulations have now been set out. There are two regulations that went online on 18 September and they set out very clearly how this reallocation of how this funding would go.

The wording they use on cohesion is that it is a modernised cohesion policy. I have the document here in the mix of all of this, but it can be accessed on the European Union's website. It is the language that is being used - "a modernised cohesion policy" and "a mid-term review". We are halfway through the European Union's seven-year budgetary cycle now and have decided we need to modernise. It is the use of this language. Why are we saying the redirecting of funding from cohesion policy to militarism is modernising, like it is something we should be proud of and it is seen as something progressive? We need to be mindful of the language being used around cohesion.