Neale Richmond (Dublin Rathdown, Fine Gael)
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I thank the Commissioner for that detailed overview. He obviously has a very wide brief in his portfolio. It is good to have him here in person after our previous video engagement. I am purely going to cover one area of his remarks relating to sanctions against Russia. I would like to focus the first part of my contribution on the freeze and seize task force to which the Commissioner has referred, and that is of extreme interest. It has been referred to numerous times in both the Dáil and Seanad. The use and establishment of such a task force has been welcome, but I note the very clear political and, more importantly, legal obstacles that stand in the way. I was wondering if the Commissioner could give us, first, a realistic timeframe as to when we might be able to see something like this up and running. Second, would he aspire to have a scope that includes the Russian bank central reserves that have been frozen as well as the assets that have been seized by member states? I was quite interested in his remark. The country the Commissioner knows best is his home country of Belgium, which has done particularly well in terms of the amount of assets it has seized. I would like to think that Ireland has done extremely well, particularly given our size. However, there is quite a clear disparity. Eight member states have done a lot of work in this area, but 19 have not. I wonder if he could offer a comment on that and on what other member states might be able to do, because there is no point doing all this work at an EU level if other member states are simply not prepared to put it in place. This goes to the heart of the sanctions debate.

On a more practical question, would the Commissioner envisage, when this is up and running, that the funds seized would be pooled into an essential reserve to be allocated to Ukraine by the EU, as some form of Marshall Plan, or would it be the responsibility of the member state? I think efficiency would be best served by working together and having one central funding package, as we have seen. The second part of my question, with the Cathaoirleach's discretion, is again on the violations. I wonder where violations have been or will be identified, what sort of punishments would be in mind for the entities and individuals who breech those sanctions?

The final aspect of that is the role of third countries. It is quite clear that third countries are being used by the Russian state to circumvent very clear sanctions put in place not only by the EU, but also by the US, Japan, Australia and other like-minded countries. Many of these countries have very sophisticated and generous relationships with the European Union. They have trade deals. They have legally binding agreements in many areas, and it really galls me that EU efforts to truly sanction and cripple the Russian war machine is being undermined by people who benefit greatly from very beneficial EU deals. Sanctioning Russia and Belarus is great, but I think the EU needs to be a lot firmer with third countries which are undermining the effort of the EU to bring this war to an end. That is something, which goes to the whole point. We are on our eighth round of sanctions. Inevitably, we will be moving to our ninth or tenth round, but they are only worth so much unless they are put in place and enforced. The more we can get our sanctions enforced not just within EU member states where there are clear issues, but within those third countries with which the EU has relationships, the more opportunity this gives the sanctions to work, and to truly have the impact needed to bring this horrendous, bloody war to an end.