Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputy Christopher O’Sullivan.

I welcome the debate. I might begin by addressing Deputy Connolly’s concluding point. She indicated we should stop what we are doing, but I am not sure whether she was suggesting we should stop the expansion of the European project. I think that if she spoke to the citizens of Ukraine, Georgia or Moldova, whose very existence is currently threatened, she would find they certainly would not appreciate us calling for a stop. In that regard, I welcome the fact those three countries have achieved candidate status for accession to the European Union.

There has been considerable talk about the potential for or likelihood of global food shortages in the coming months and years because of the war, although I will not go into that given my party colleague Deputy Ó Cathasaigh did so in great detail. I support Deputy Bacik’s call for the fast-tracking of a Magnitsky Bill, something that has been referred to in this House a number of times. If we wish to get to the core of the Russian money that is financing the war, we should seek to fast-track that Bill.

One item on the agenda of the European Council over the coming days will concern the outcome of the Conference on the Future of Europe. In many respects, as I read through the 49 proposals and 48 recommendations in the document, I felt it was almost as though the Green Party had had a strong hand in writing it, given it goes very much into the core areas of food, transport and energy. In many ways, what the Conference on the Future of Europe has come up with aligns closely with what the Government is trying to do and, indeed, what the Green Party has been expressing for a long time, notwithstanding that there are gaps and blind spots in this country.

By reading the document, one can see where those are. Proposal 1 refers to an objective to develop a climate-responsible agriculture system to safeguard the environment, biodiversity and ecosystems. I wonder whether we are doing that, especially with regard to the Common Agricultural Policy strategic plan, which is being proposed to the European Commission very shortly. It does not seem to me that we are aligning with this particular objective.

When I talk about agriculture, I talk about the carbon impact of agriculture. One aspect of the proposals of the Conference on the Future of Europe is quite interesting. There is a reference to animal welfare, which is something to which I have admittedly not paid much heed in the past. I was on a ferry to France recently, and approximately 20 of the trucks on board were full of week-old calves. While the trucks were shiny and well-maintained, one could not help but feel that the system whereby we have expanded dairy in this country in the past number of years in such a way that we have a huge number of male calves being produced cannot be seen as anything but mad. We are sending these low-value animals over to Europe, often in deplorable conditions, and to North Africa, where their fate is even worse.

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