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

I also express my continuing and ongoing dismay at the way in which the Taoiseach and the EPP continue to tolerate, collude with and co-operate with the vile regime of Viktor Orbán. There are farmers outside today protesting against an EU plan to do a deal with another vile regime, that of Bolsonaro and the Mercosur countries. With that in mind, I would like the Taoiseach to explain to me how we could in any way consider working with a regime that is accelerating a devastating programme of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. The Amazon rainforest produces 20% of global oxygen, and in the last ten years alone, an area the size of Portugal has been cut down. Bolsonaro is systematically dismantling the Brazilian environmental protection agency, he has called for an extermination of the indigenous people of the Amazon to be carried out on a similar scale to the extermination of the indigenous population in North America and he told a political opponent that she is not worthy of raping. This guy is filthy. How can we give favourable trade status to regimes such as this in order to then destroy beef farmers in this country, with the devastating consequences they are facing? How is that in any way in tune with the progressive values the Taoiseach so often ascribes to the European Union? What about the transport emissions that would be involved in massively expanding the sale of gas-guzzling German cars and pharmaceuticals in Brazil and Brazil in turn cutting down rainforests in order to send beef back here? Does that not just make complete hypocrisy of the European Union's claim to be a progressive and environmentally-forward defender of human rights and so on? Is it not just the purest hypocrisy?

See this speech in context