Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Thomas Pringle for tabling this Private Members' motion. An opinion poll carried out across Europe in recent weeks showed that people were becoming more Eurosceptic. There is a lack of vision. We see bits and pieces of things happening in the absence of an overall vision of what kind of European Union will emerge at the end of this crisis. We are still in the middle of that crisis. I was looking at a recent paper by Jürgen Habermas, from which I have quoted before, in which he referred to the gulf between citizens' opinion and will formation, on the one hand, and the policies actually adopted to solve pressing problems, on the other. He says that what unites European citizens today are the Eurosceptical mindsets that have become more pronounced in all member states during the crisis, albeit in each country for different and rather polarising reasons. He says crisis management is pushed and implemented in the first place by a large camp of pragmatic politicians who pursue an incrementalist agenda but lack a comprehensive perspective. They are orientated more towards Europe because they want to avoid the far more dramatic and, presumably, costly alternative of abandoning the euro.

That is a reasonable analysis. He is quite prescriptive in saying that if one wants to preserve the monetary union, it is no longer enough, given the structural imbalances between the national economies, to provide loans to over-indebted states so that each should improve its competitiveness by its own efforts. What is required instead is solidarity, a co-operative effort from a shared political perspective to promote growth and competitiveness in the eurozone as a whole. Such an effort will require Germany and several other countries to accept short and medium-term negative redistribution effects in their longer-term self-interest. He is saying this is a classic example of solidarity. We are seeing bits and pieces that are more like crumbs from the table, although I am sure they were hard fought.

A small number of countries are dictating policy at European level in their self-interest. It is hard to see how the European Union can survive if that continues. The idea that EU lawmaking from 2014 will be done on a straight population basis gives large countries like France and Germany an even more dominant position. Ireland becomes even smaller and more insignificant. We can see the way the unequal way countries are treated, with Ireland and Cyprus good examples, in that situation.

We are being marched into a federal Europe in an undemocratic way behind closed doors. We will be presented with a treaty as a fait accompliand it will probably be sold in the same way as other treaties, such as the Single European Act or the Maastricht treaty. We may not be given a raft of money but it will be sold on the basis that we might get a little debt forgiveness.

I opposed the Maastricht treaty, as did the Tánaiste. We were in the same party at the time and I remember knocking on doors on that issue. I was no fan of the Maastricht treaty because I thought that if it went wrong, those who would pay the price would be the people who are paying the price at the moment. There is no sign of European solidarity and until we can see that vision, the people and citizens of Europe will not continue to accept what is happening. It will come to a flashpoint in different ways in different countries but the European elections next year will be a decent test of what the citizens think.

The European Union was founded on debt forgiveness and Germany was the biggest recipient of that under the London debt agreement of 1953. The only thing that seems to be remembered is hyperinflation. A reminder is necessary because wonderful things happened in the post-war movement. One was the vision of Beveridge and it is astonishing to think that, in the middle of the war, he could come up with the social vision needed in terms of protection provided by the state. It gave people real hope. We lack any similar vision coming from the European Union today, yet the economic crisis for some countries is on a par with the period after the Second World War. There is a failure to articulate a social vision or if there can be a social Europe after the crisis is over. The only thing that is important is to keep banks and the European economy functioning. If the European Union is not there for the citizens of Europe, what is its purpose?

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