Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

If Europe is supposed to mean anything, it should be about international solidarity among the peoples of Europe and creating a beacon of progress and an agency of peace in the world. However, that is not what the EU looks like today. We have war in Ukraine, in which Europe has a hand, hundreds of people desperately trying to get into Europe to escape terrible situations in the developing world and losing their lives in the Mediterranean, and cruel austerity inflicted for the past seven years at the behest of the people who seem to really run Europe - the bankers, bondholders and money men. They are inflicting really vicious austerity on the ordinary citizens of Europe, to the point at which the EU is threatened with a break-up. This is what we are looking at with the possibility that the general election in the UK could lead to the possible exit of that country from the EU. There is also the very precarious situation in Greece, which could be forced out of the EU because of the really bloody-minded and vindictive attitude of the European authorities, and, behind them, the ECB and the financial markets in Europe, which find it acceptable to sacrifice the livelihoods, services, dignity and rights of the people of Greece on the altar of profit and maintaining the international financial system of speculation, banking and so on. Europe is in a very precarious situation, and one can add to that the very alarming rise of neo-fascist organisations in Germany, Greece and France and the rise of the far right in the UK. These are very worrying signs. One can add to that the shameful collaboration of the EU with Israel, which has been given favoured trading status. While Israel crushes the Palestinian people in a most obscene and brutal way, Europe does nothing about it but continues to do business with it.

If we want to save the European project, we must remember that human beings come first. Europe must not be a place of money men, bankers, bondholders and people who only see the bottom line. It must be a place that puts the rights and dignity of human beings front and centre, regardless of whether they are human beings trying to enter Europe or ordinary working people across the Europe. If we fail to do that, the EU is riding towards a crisis and a break-up, and the darker possibility of a return to the sort of crises we saw in the 1930s, with all the horrendous consequences that followed from that.

We are at a critical crossroads. Is it Europe for people or Europe for profit? Currently, it is Europe for profit and that is a Europe that will not last the distance.

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