Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

On behalf of the Green Party, I greatly appreciate the opportunity to set out some of our thoughts and, if I may, to take a wide and long-term perspective. This is because Members present are engaging with a decision to be made across the Irish Sea of historic consequences and they must think in the long term and must consider the bigger picture regarding their commentary and advice in that regard. It is interesting in itself and I cannot help thinking of an Irish Parliament advising the United Kingdom to stay in a Union. If one goes back to 1800 and the passage of the Act of Union here, it is strange that 216 years later, pretty much all Members - perhaps with some exceptions - are advocating they should not go but should stay in the Union, while a Tory-led campaign on the other side is advocating a break-up of the Union. This is the sort of perspective Members must consider. If one takes that timeline and considers what happened in the interim - I will not go through the full annals of Irish history and the injustices done in the 19th century - it is clear that what happened in the world during the 19th century was an inability to manage the industrial revolution that was developing in the United Kingdom in particular and in the rest of Europe, as well as an inability to manage the inequities in the relative power balances between capital and labour. The consequences of our inability to do this became evident in the 20th century in the form of demagoguery, fascism and the wars that wreaked such havoc in Europe during the first half of that century.

Obviously, the central story of the European Union is that it was established as a Union in response to the horror and the failure of the European Continent to manage the Industrial Revolution and the changes that came with it. This is how one must consider from where the roots of the Union came. It was not simply in Europe as in its establishment of the National Health Service, the United Kingdom obviously took a similar response. It took time for the United Kingdom, together with Ireland, to join the European Union but there was the same experience in the United States with the introduction of the GI Bill. There was a general collective consciousness, as it were, within the political system that the development of societies must be managed in a fairer, more equitable way. If one takes a long-term perspective, any assessment would be that the European Union has achieved internally a level of peace.

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Moreover, after the Cold War eventually came to an end, that the first and immediate priority of ten of the eastern countries was to join the European Union says something in itself. Even in recent years, despite the many failings of our Union, the fact that most countries on our borders are looking to join says something that we should be conscious and aware of in terms of our assessment, or any assessment I would recommend to the UK, of how that Union is working.

I share some of the comments of colleagues who spoke earlier. Without doubt, it is not a perfect union. It is a union that failed in many ways. When looking at the bigger picture and the balance between the control and power of capitalism versus labour, the Union itself lost its way. The expression of that was clear during the financial crashes of 2008. Across the western world, we had put excessive faith in the power of markets and competition to deliver our needs. The European Union institutions failed. Anyone who has worked closely with the Union sees that the competition commissioner dominates all. Europe cannot be blind to the fact that the European Union in Brussels has 30,000 civil servants - a very compact and capable civil service - who are matched by 30,000 lobbyists, most of them coming with a business perspective. There are, therefore, failings in our Union.

We saw it here as much as any country. The lack of community in the response to the financial crisis was perhaps the biggest failing. We went back to the old style 19th century and early 20th century deals where France and Germany thought they could sit down together and work out the issue. We should be conscious of that and other failings. There is the continued failure within the European Union on the migration crisis. It is a failure of lack of community. We are not strong when we are not united. There are several examples. When one looks at the failings, a lack of union rather than excess union is what is behind many of them. A further failing is the failure in our western European approach to work and connect with the rest of the world in a way that is fair. The UK and French Governments seem to have a particular historical attraction to thinking that one can effect or lever international peace through war. What happened in Iraq and Libya in recent years are recent examples of how we still seem to have not learned the lesson about how we as a wealthy Continent connect to the world in an effective way.

Our union has failings but the response has to be to change the Union rather than leave it. To take the big picture again, if we want to create a secure future for our people, the response should be to see the biggest challenge of our day is not just to re-regulate and balance the balance between capital and labour but also to recognise there is a third element which should dominate our thinking in so many different ways. That third element is how we should manage our natural capital and live in an integrated way in this world with each other and with the natural world. To do that, we need the Union. Otherwise, we will not be able to do it. The very nature of how that capital works is that it does not recognise borders. It does not work in that 19th century, reductionist way. We now know and have a more ecological understanding of the world and how we and the whole system are interconnected.

We need our union because we need to regulate international capitalism. No country in the European Union is strong enough on its own. If one works in digital tech systems and so on, where a revolution is happening, one realises the Union itself is barely big enough to control and shape it. However, at least we have the size to try. This country on its own would not be able to do it. If we break off, split and have a much smaller Union, we will not have the ability we need to regulate international finance. We will not be able to regulate the Internet in a way that makes it citizen-centred, empowers citizens and brings up and opens the opportunities the digital revolution brings.

More than anything else and taking that historical perspective, Europe was the cradle of the first industrial revolution but we will not be the centre of the new, clean energy industrial revolution unless we work together. We will not have the necessary scale, investment or capabilities if we split. That new industrial revolution will happen in China or the US. We will be followers. We will be buying our hardware from Asia and our software from the US and we will be diminished as a people.

We therefore have this task to change the Union. As stated by our President, Mr. Michael D. Higgins, in a speech he gave to the Irish Association of Contemporary European Studies at the Royal Irish Academy earlier this week, our task extends to developing "solidarity within the Union and solidarity in the wider world". Our task is to use that undoubted revolution to be hyper-efficient in everything we do, recognising that we, the wealthiest 20% of people in the world, can no longer assume that we will consume 80% of the resources. We have to let the rest of the world rise out of poverty and maintain our standard of living by using these new revolutions taking place in digital and clean energy systems so that our people have a peaceful and secure future.

If Britain leaves, it will have less influence on how that works. If it leaves, its union will be broken up, with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland heading in a different direction. Deputy Catherine Murphy might think it might turn in to some socialist idyll if Britain were to leave, but I fear it would turn into some weird tax haven, like Singapore, in the north-west Atlantic. I do not believe it will work. If Britain leaves, Ireland will be worse off. It will be Ireland further divided. In this the 100 year anniversary of the foundation of our State, I cannot help but think all the time about how we have failed in allowing our island to be divided and having not brought back that great Scottish, Presbyterian, dissenting, Republican tradition and connected it more closely with ourselves. I do not want to see an island further divided if Britain leaves the European Union.

If Britain leaves, Ireland will be worse off because there will be an economic shock. Too much of our emphasis here is on the trade and economic aspects but they are real. It would be significant at a time when we are just getting over the worst of it. I do not want to see our country trip into another recession. If Britain leaves, we will lose an ally that we need. We have a good relationship with this country. We all know it. We are strong now in our independence. We are strong and confident in our own sense of identity. That comes with supporting British soccer teams, as needs be, if they are playing the right type of football.

In our most difficult time, in 2008, Britain was an ally. I experienced and was closely involved in it. Britain pumped approximately €20 billion into our banks, a sum that not many take into account in the calculus of what went on then. When things got really tough around that time with the troika, Britain was close and helped. It did not go into a distant working arrangement. We need to hold that ally and it needs not to fear. As the President again said:

we should not allow [our] best informed pessimism to petrify our will to act and think daringly ... what is required [now] is no less than the paradigm shift, a theoretical leap in our scholarship ... we [need to] breathe new life into the enabling and inspiring principle of solidarity [as I said, both within the union and in the wider world].

As he says, we need to express "our humanity itself in a sustainable way and [save our] collective future". That is what is at stake here. We must not trip up and make the mistakes we made in the 19th century and which led to the war in the 20th century.

I will be writing to my first cousins. I have ten of them in the UK. We have to be sensitive in how we tell them to vote. However, I will be writing to them. Perhaps I will send them a tune with the immortal words of one Irish song. It is a beautiful spring day here in Dublin. It is good to be alive:

There’s a smell of fresh cut grass

And it’s filling up my senses

And the sun is shining down on the blossoms in the avenue.

There’s a buzzing fly hanging

Around the bluebells and the daisies

And there’s a lot more loving left in this world.

[So] Don’t go.

Don’t leave [us] now...

Stick around and laugh a while.

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