Neale Richmond (Dublin Rathdown, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate the opportunity to make a few points on the upcoming European Council meeting and also the inaugural meeting of the European Political Community, which is long overdue and extremely welcome. It is a forum of aspirant and former member states that is much needed by everyone in the orbit of the European Union at a time when talking has never been this important. Historically, the European Union has, sadly, treated many applicants from accession countries quite badly. It has strung them along and put them on the long finger. While at times there is a need for domestic reforms, this should not always be the responsibility of accession countries. It is also the responsibility of the European Union to ease that process.

This is a very welcome step forward. The European Political Community is at the initial stages and is being done on a head-of-government basis, which is very welcome. In due course, there must be an opportunity to provide for an interparliamentary and interministerial element in the European Political Community if it is to genuinely have a real endorsement from member state parliaments and have teeth.

When it comes to Ireland-UK relationships, the inability to meet colleagues on the margins, as the Minister of State does at European Council meetings and parliamentarians do at meetings of the Conference of Parliamentary Committees for Union Affairs, COSAC, and elsewhere, has been diminishing to those relationships. That has been very evident after a difficult couple of months. We all hope we are starting to turn a corner, albeit a moving one.

With regard to the European Political Community, the Council of Europe, the OECD and other bodies and interparliamentary assemblies, we have to see a formalising of relationships and engagements between us and our British colleagues at interparliamentary and intergovernmental level, notwithstanding the desperate need to see the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement back up and fully running in due course.

On the European Council meeting, which will take place later this week, like others, I welcome the eighth round of sanctions on Russia. However, I fear that in the next month or six weeks, we will be talking about a ninth and, inevitably, a tenth round of sanctions.

The scenes over the past few days of indiscriminate Russian bombing of Ukraine stand to that. I would be making the point repeatedly at European Council meetings that sanctions on Russia or indeed Belarus, which we have seen extensively, are not good enough by themselves. We also need sanctions on third-party actors that fuel the Russian war machine. We are led to believe the Iranian Government has provided the drones for so many of the awful scenes we have witnessed over the last few days. I also think more widely of the other states the EU has detailed and important relationships with. These are countries that benefit from lucrative trade deals and other relationships with the EU and they have not put any sanctions on Vladimir Putin's vicious regime, or if they have they are fairly light-touch, to say the least. Crucially, the biggest failures in that regard are within the EU itself. They are within member states that are exploiting the loopholes and flagrantly breaching the sanctions or allowing business as usual to carry on as it suits them. That is somewhere where we in the EU must get our own house in order. We must make the point to other member states and other countries around the world that if they wish to continue to have a good, profitable and lucrative relationship with the EU on an economic, cultural and societal level, they need to start taking firm and genuine action against Vladimir Putin and his war machine.

We can see how this ties into the situation with energy supply. As we edge ever closer to the depths of winter and appreciate how much this is going to start to have a huge impact on every household across the EU and much more widely, we see the targeting by the Russian regime of power plants in Ukraine. The regime has already used food as a weapon of war and now it is going to use energy and the ability to heat one's home as such a weapon. It is an absolutely vile approach but when we look in an EU context at what is needed from this Council meeting, it is a swift decision on the level of intervention when it comes to the so-called windfall tax or to engaging with energy companies. There is no point in individual member states, especially smaller ones, going it alone and it is disappointing when bigger ones do so. Compare that with the vaccine roll-out when we worked as a collective EU 27. That is how genuine improvement can be made. I implore the Minister of State to ensure we see clear action at this week's Council meeting when it comes to energy. There must be clear action that can be translated to the bills of people at home or in business to say this is something the EU has done and it is a saving the EU is ensuring every citizen can make the most of in advance of extremely difficult times.

Another key point that will be discussed is the economy. We are obviously aware of the impact of the war. One of the areas I wanted to focus on was the resilience funds. These were born out of the Covid-19 pandemic, which was a global pandemic the likes of which had not been seen for a century, but there is going to be a much greater need for them now and a much more diverse need. That changing set of circumstances needs to be reflected in an ability for flexibility to allow member states to tweak their own resilience plans but crucially for the Commission to respond to any tweaks or alterations by member states in a swift manner. Deputy Lahart and I attended a European Presidency meeting in Prague on behalf of the committees on budgetary oversight and finance. The point was made that there is a huge concern that the needs of resilience and recovery plans will change or have changed but that unfortunately the Commission is being too slow in its response to member states.

On the economy more widely, we can look at the data collected in the ESRI report on the UK's trading relationship with Ireland and the EU and how it has so drastically changed since Brexit. There has been a massive drop in trade in both directions between Great Britain and the EU. That is of huge concern. We always said the impact of Brexit will be masked by the pandemic. Now it is being masked by the war in Ukraine and the related crises that fall out of it, but we need increasing emphasis on engagement between Ireland and our EU member state partners. The fact only 6% of SMEs are exporting to the Continent is worrying and shows the opportunity in these extremely challenging times for Irish businesses and the wider economy to limit the damage of Brexit and the more general economic challenges that are presenting, and to try to offset that as best as possible.

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