Mairead Farrell (Galway West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I recognise that the Ukrainian ambassador is with us in the House today. I spoke earlier, as my colleague Deputy Brady alluded to, on the use of section 110 of the tax code in the IFSC and the funnelling of money. What I am speaking on now is broader and concerns security situations within Europe. One of the EU Commission will have us believe is that halting climate change is its top priority. Of course, the impending climate catastrophe has to be stopped. However, in the summer of 2021, it decided for the first time since the founding of the Common Market to allocate funds directly from the EU budget to fund the military, and this decision is a disaster for the planet. Everyone knows the carbon footprint of war and weaponry is a major accelerator of climate change. Worse still, we are not talking about paltry sums. The sum involved is colossal at €49 billion. If the truth were told, there were plans to almost double that figure, but that was only prevented due to the cost of the Covid pandemic. What an utter waste of resources, when one thinks how these resources could be employed for the common good, including battling climate change. The amount of waste in the manufacture of armaments, from the production of the metals to the consumption of fossil fuels to the running of tanks or warplanes, is vast. War and armaments are the very antithesis of sustainability.

Another sinister plan was to suck in the Irish industry and SMEs to be involved in this military-industrial sector. A report from the EU defence ministers' summit in 2020 referred to Enterprise Ireland being directly involved in bringing Irish SMEs into this work. The buzzword behind developing an EU military-industrial complex and an EU army is "autonomy" but what about Irish autonomy or, another word, neutrality? The Minister needs to project that positive neutrality. It was our past neutral stance that got us elected, by the small nations of the world, to the UN Security Council. I am concerned that a security and military union is scheduled to be the next stage of EU integration.

As long ago as 2016, the then Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker, called for an EU security union with the end goal of establishing an EU army. When the permanent structured co-operation, PESCO, was launched, Junker tweeted, "Permanent Structured Cooperation is happening. I welcome the operational steps taken today by Member States to lay the foundations of a European #DefenceUnion." The European Parliament, meanwhile, called for the EU to upgrade its military to use its full potential as a world power. In December 2017, Ireland joined PESCO in the first steps of the formation of this. Membership of PESCO obliges the State to increase military spending from its current 0.3% of GDP, the lowest in the EU, to a potential 2%. We have a proud tradition of neutrality and we must reject any ties to these kinds of military alliances. The reality is we do not want to see the use of warplanes.

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