Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Clearly, the decision to seek room for an additional €1.5 billion is the first move towards the spring statement and is intended to allow the announcement of as many initiatives as possible.

The European semester process that the Taoiseach signed off on last week is designed to give transparency and certainty to policy. Due to the Taoiseach's approach, though, we are getting nothing of the sort. A major question is whether the Government intends to ignore recently introduced legislation on budgetary and financial procedures. The Oireachtas has established the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council to review economic projections and fiscal policy before and after major announcements. Why has it been excluded from the discussion? Why is the Government proposing to announce four years of budgets but not willing to have any outside consultation or review?

Yet again we have a case of the Government having a public relations policy but no clear economic policy, a Government that did not deliver recovery but did everything possible to make it as unfair as it could be. The primary objective for the Government is to claim credit for things and stop the more important debate of helping people to understand what has been happening. The Taoiseach continues to sell a fairy tale of his decisive actions and steely negotiating skills when the truth shows nothing of the sort. In terms of the reduction in interest rates for all bailout loans to all countries, the reduction in borrowing costs and the vital policy changes of the ECB, particularly of its president, Mr. Mario Draghi, nothing in any of these decisions was influenced by our Government. Reductions negotiated by others were automatically extended to Ireland and were four times larger than for what our Government asked. As the Taoiseach admitted at the time, he held no discussion with Mr. Mario Draghi before the latter's appointment.

The implementation of a quantitative easing policy by the ECB in the face of opposition by some countries is a decisive move by an organisation that is now willing to do whatever it legally can to try to spark a wider recovery. It is not enough and it is at best a short-term measure that carries some dangers, but Ireland should welcome it and call for other institutions to do more.

The failure of the Greek economy to recover is the most striking example of the need to change policies. It appears that, as acknowledged by the Taoiseach, all significant discussions last week took place in a smaller meeting, something that in itself is not a good development. The situation today is more serious than it has been at any point in the past five years. Fianna Fáil has been arguing for the past two years that Greece needs further substantial action on its debt if it is to be given a credible path to growth. This is not to say that Greece should be allowed do whatever it wants with other people's money, but there is a need for a long-term solution. The evidence is that such a solution is not close. In fact, it is now reasonable to ask whether Syriza wants to find a solution or is just trying to manage the blame game for when the full crisis comes.

The Syriza-led Government’s actions in recent weeks have not shown that it is committed to finding a solution which respects other countries. It is fully entitled to seek to end austerity but equally it promised before the election that it had a detailed reform plan ready to implement and that it knew exactly how to ease the debt burden but not endanger Greece’s commitments to the euro and the EU. The failure to produce even the most basic reform plan is striking. Slogans which get a crowd going are not the same thing as policies which can be implemented. Wiring tourists to catch VAT fraud is not an initiative which will deliver the type of revenue Greek public services need. It is reported that Prime Minister Tsipras even objected at the summit to international inspectors being able to check the current status of Greece’s Government accounts, claiming that this was an affront to sovereignty. He did so in spite of the fact that every member of the IMF has been subject to this scrutiny since the organisation was founded.

The new policy of aggressively attacking and insulting other governments may well simply be part of managing a diverse range of party factions. Whatever the origins it is undermining the possibility of building a consensus for helping Greece. The statement by a Minister that Greece would unleash immigrants on Europe if it did not get what it was asking for was not only wrong, it was playing to the worst type of fears currently being exploited by extremists throughout the Continent. Another Minister said that Greece wants €350 billion in reparations for past wars, including €20 billion supposedly still owed under the Treaty of Versailles. This is the type of rhetoric designed to create divisions, not to persuade.

It is clear that the new government has a mandate to change direction, but other governments also have democratic mandates and they also have the right to represent the interests of their people. It appears that the Eurogroup is willing to change the terms of Greek debts quite significantly and, in doing so, lift the short-term and medium-term impact of these debts. What is not yet clear is whether Greece actually wants to negotiate. For the sake of the people of Greece we should all hope that what we have been seeing is temporary. Prime Minister Tsipras’s letter of last week saying that Greece is running out of money is sobering. It may well be that an agreement cannot be reached, but it would serve everyone’s interests if the sloganeering and aggression were put aside for a few weeks and there was a genuine effort to find one.

I welcome that the summit discussed and refused to lift current sanctions on Russia for its invasion and partition of Ukraine. The real substance of the Minsk accords revolves around whether Russia will allow Ukraine to regain control of its own international border. It is ominous that the Russian-installed rebel leaders announced last week that they want Russia to lead a so-called peacekeeping mission to Donetsk and Luhansk. They have rejected the proposal that a genuinely independent peacekeeping force from the United Nations or the OSCE be sent, and they continue to deny OSCE monitors access to many areas. In the four other frozen conflicts which have involved the de factopartitioning of states formerly under the imperial control of Russia the installation of Russian peacekeepers has been the moment when the sovereignty of the state was ended in the enclave. In the occupied parts of Georgia this has gone even further.

The sanctions have had an impact. Kremlin-linked oligarchs are the ones who have suffered the most and the sanctions have shown that Europe is not willing to simply do nothing in the face of the invasion and partition of Ukraine. We should also note that the deterioration of human rights in Crimea continues. Two people have been convicted for the crime of flying the Ukrainian flag. The Tatar minority is being suppressed. Freedom of speech is disappearing. In the face of this, President Putin has confirmed that he and the Russian state invaded Crimea before the illegitimate referendum. He has also continued his recent bullying policy towards other states, making trial bombing runs against a number of neutral states including Ireland and Sweden. At the weekend his Government announced that Denmark would be the target of nuclear attacks if it went ahead with a missile shield.

Sinn Féin has, of course, maintained its policy of refusing to stand with Ukraine against its partition by Russia. It continues to use the weasel words of blaming the United States and Europe while steadfastly refusing to make the simple statement that Russia should get out of Ukraine. As predicted a fortnight ago the massed ranks of Sinn Féin representatives that went to the United States last week did not repeat their attack on the Obama Administration while they were busy collecting cheques. Deputy Adams even took the time to have a hissy fit over the fact that the US Administration was not making a senior enough official available to receive him in Washington.

It remains the case that there is an extremist alliance in Europe standing with Russia against the citizens of neighbouring countries. Last week a Kremlin-funded group held a conference in St. Petersburg where the British National Party, Golden Dawn of Greece and other fascist parties spoke up in favour of Putin’s actions. At the weekend the French Front National used an €8 million soft loan from Russia to fund regional election campaigns. There is, in fact, almost no hard right or hard left party in Europe which does not support the increasingly authoritarian and aggressive Putin regime. I welcome the element in the Taoiseach's statement relating to the concerted effort by Europe to deal with Russian disinformation on the Continent.

Deputy Boyd Barrett need not take this as applying to him as he did in our last session. He is unusual in the Irish Left in having protested outside the Russian Embassy in the past. However, he too is guilty of applying false equivalences in this case. Nothing Europe has done in any way justifies what Russia has done to Ukraine. The Ukrainian people want to live in a free, united, democratic and European country. They have voted for this time and again and they have voted for the EU association agreement in overwhelming numbers. They gave up their nuclear weapons in return for a promise that their borders would be respected. It is our duty to stand with them and we should support a significant expansion in direct aid.

On the subject of energy, the summit moved the agenda along in a formal way. I recognise the central and vital necessity of an energy union because unity of purpose across the European Union is essential for our energy security into the future. I also welcome the additional focus on the conclusion of bilateral agreements outside of the European energy union itself. However, the focus is not yet active or urgent enough to tackle the twin crises of climate change and energy blackmail, which go to the heart of a lot of the political instability and geopolitical challenges which Europe and the European Union currently face.

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