Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)

This is an important debate. Unfortunately, it comprises statements rather than a motion. I would like to use this democratically elected House to send a message to the European Commission. I spent three years as a Member of the European Parliament, three of my most rewarding years in public life. If there was one word I understood at the end of those three years, it was the "solidarity". It is not a word that I understood when I first became a Member of the European Parliament or that I really embraced when growing up. However, it resonated for me every week in debates in the European Parliament, many of which debates were emotive. I was a Member at a time when new member states joined the Union and when French and German MEPs were marking the end of the Second World War and the setting up of the European Union.

I remind Commissioner Rehn and others, for whom I have a lot of time, that Ireland now needs solidarity. We have not asked for it before. Ireland will never need solidarity in terms of military protection but it has a self-created catastrophe based on the debt it will have to incur in the coming years. We require understanding and solidarity from our European partners. The idea that Ireland would have to pay interest of between 6% and 7% on funds drawn from an emergency stability fund, contributed to primarily by EU member states, is totally inconsistent with the principles of the European Union, to which I am absolutely committed, and with everything I learned as a young MEP in the European Parliament. I remind the EU delegation in Ireland that this is not about teaching Ireland a lesson or sending out a signal to other countries in the Union that if they must access emergency funds, it will cost them. It should be a question of member states who can afford to do so helping out a small country that has made a mess of its finances and governance because of irresponsible banking and irresponsible political behaviour in government.

Ireland needs a solidarity fund. Unfortunately, we have had to compromise our sovereignty and independent decision-making in order to access that fund. We need a fund that we can draw on while incurring little or no interest, perhaps with increasing interest rates over time, after which we will have been given time to breathe and rebuild our economy, as we have the capacity to do. In the short term, however, we will not have the capacity to grow as a country and economy and build the kind of lifestyle we need to build here and elsewhere in Europe if we strangle the people with interest rates such that we will be spending 20% to 30% of taxation revenue repaying interest on loans we are now negotiating with EU member states. Whatever about the IMF, I want to send that message to the European Commission. The message is from a member state that has been loyal and committed to the European project from the very outset and which has worked hard to achieve certain outcomes in referenda when it was difficult to do so.

We are debating a national recovery plan. Young people were present in the Visitors Gallery for the Minister's speech. Does he believe they are leaving the House inspired in the belief that they will be more likely to get a job in two years than now? Does he believe their parents will be inspired to believe that this country, although everybody, apart from totally unrealistic people in the House, accepts we need to take pain-----

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