Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 15 October 2025
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure, Public Service Reform and Digitalisation, and Taoiseach
Scrutiny of EU Legislative Proposals
2:00 am
Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent)
There will be a threshold of up to 35%. We should remind ourselves that we are dealing with very large amounts of money. I am looking at amounts of €3 billion and €14 billion, which are extraordinarily large. I note €16 billion will be drawn down by Hungary. I think it was mentioned earlier by one of the speakers from the Department that we have had concerns about Hungary and it abiding by the rule of law. Yet, we are potentially looking at a situation where we are underwriting €16 billion in military expenditure by a country where significant concerns about authoritarianism and the rule of law have been raised. We heard discussions about the safeguards, or the lack of safeguards, on the redirecting of the cohesion funding but there do not appear to any such safeguard for the loans.
On where the military expenditure is deployed, the opening statement referred to defence but is it the case that there is not any caveat or restriction on how weapons purchased under these schemes may be used? For example, if a country used them not for defensive purposes but in an offensive military action or a military action in the service of interests, would that be a matter for that country? Would we still underwrite its loans?
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