Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputy Alan Farrell. I am very pleased to be here to mark 50 years of Ireland's membership of the European Union. It will be for others today to balance whether that was a broadly positive or negative move in their view. In my view it has been overwhelmingly positive. It unlocked the potential of a State that was emerging from oppression under an empire and happened under a generation who had fought for that freedom. They were so far-seeing in their open approach to nationalism that they wanted to share and pool their sovereignty across the Continent. They believed that was the best way for Ireland to protect itself and to have its place among the nations.

I am very proud of the part that Fianna Fáil played in leading us into Europe. Many of those who fought in 1916 went on to found our party but we do not believe that any one item of history is owned by any one political party. I saw a row yesterday on Twitter between different Members of this House and journalists about who voted for and against accession. There were people who campaigned against it and had fears about the European Union but rather than taking glory in that, I would say that I am happy that their fears did not come to fruition. They did not. Many of the concerns people had were addressed by our membership of the European Union. I refer to better pay for women, better opportunities for younger people and better access to services right across Europe. For all of those things, today is an important day.

It is also a day to reflect on what the European Union means to each of us, "my European Union" as Deputy Berry said. I just listened to a podcast series called "Revolutions" by Mike Duncan. It traces the history of revolutions across Europe and how democracy took a foothold. Inevitably, halfway through each revolution, the country involved ended up going to war with another European country. All of the striving for progress to make people's lives better in that country or city was stymied by the impact of war. It is the great peace process. The absence of the commonality of the European Union in the North, I believe, is a significant factor playing into some of the divisions. We know that when nationalisms rub up against each other it creates friction and that is what is happening with a more overt form of British nationalism through Brexit. It does not come at no cost. When its nationalism rubs up against the sovereignty of other countries it creates friction. We know that the European Union is one place where such friction is reduced and in many cases, competing nationalism is eliminated.

Europe is worth having as something to inspire us. Europe needs to protect that inspiration and protect itself as well. It needs to do that by making its citizens' lives better. One of the places where Europe fails to do that is in our urban centres. We have regional economic balance within Ireland but there are pockets of disadvantage in every city of Europe, where the right wing and populist nationalism are exploiting some of the real concerns and problems in those communities and saying that popular nationalism is one of the ways to solve them. We in this House know that popular nationalism has led us down culs-de-sac before and does not deliver solutions. This country is largely exempt from a rise of the populist right but we will not always be. One of the ways in which we stopped the populist right from exploiting problems in places like inner cities where there is urban disadvantage is by having instruments that go in there and solve those problems. Europe does not do enough to tackle disadvantage. It does a lot to tackle regional imbalance but not enough to tackle urban disadvantage. We need to do more.

Europe is something worth protecting and worth fighting for. We can look at what we have in Europe, the openness, the tolerance, the belief in each other, the belief that we can live in an open and tolerant society. There are many places in the world where that does not exist. There will be times when we will need to fight for that, both diplomatically and, perhaps, on occasions when we are attacked, militarily. Europe is and continues to be something worth protecting and fighting for.

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