Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Tomorrow there will be a celebration of peace and unity in Europe. On 9 May 1950 the then French foreign Minister, Robert Schuman, made the first move towards the creation of the European Union. This happened only five years after the Second World War, when trust between the countries involved was extremely low and they were trying to heal their wounds and rebuild their war damaged economies and infrastructure. The countries made that effort then. They wanted to include in the agreement that they had almost destroyed themselves and had fought one of the most brutal wars with modern weaponry that the world had ever seen.

It also included the area of reconciliation and co-operation, a radical and brave move and hard to imagine only five years after the conflict.

Some 63 years on, it is hard to imagine how far Europe has come since the dark days of the Second World War. However, the European Union is now facing its biggest crisis since its creation which is having a negative effect on individuals and their families right across Europe. It has led to food queues in Greece, brought hundreds of thousands of Portuguese out onto the streets to protest, while unemployment in Spain now stands at 27.2%. Emigration levels in Ireland are comparable to when an Gorta Mór was killing the Irish people and driving others abroad in search of a new life for themselves and their families.

There is a growing awareness that cutting expenditure and increasing taxes will not get the European Union out of this disastrous financial situation. What is needed is a focus on job creation, growth and protecting the most vulnerable in our societies. Unilateral austerity will continue to drive the European Union into a destabilising abyss from which it might never recover.

The European Union is made up of 27 member states, has 23 official languages and a population of over 503 million. There is no predesigned or linear path that it has to follow as it grows and develops. Over 503 million people have made the European Union their home. What type of home will it become? The European Union does not have to be dominated by the policies of austerity, policies which have utterly failed people and communities right across Europe. We do not have to create a two-tiered European Union that punishes the peripheral countries, or southern and Mediterranean states, with crippling cuts and restrictive macroeconomic programmes.

As the European Union faces into the heart of this crisis, what we need is greater solidarity between EU citizens, not the strong versus the weak model being promoted. We know the political instability caused by the current economic approach and the deterioration of socioeconomic standards are also fuelling racism, sectarianism, reduced democratic accountability and an increase in support for far-right parties. The peoples of Europe have stood against and fought fascism on many occasions since its emergence in Italy under Mussolini, in Germany under Hitler, in Spain under Franco, in Romania, Croatia and Portugal. The list goes on.

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