Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

President Metsola is very welcome. This period of commemoration allows us to think big for a moment.

We have just celebrated our 100th year of the establishment of the State. In listening to President Metsola's words, I was thinking that it was founded on a real desire to stand on our own two feet as a nation, a strong sense of a nationalism, but that it was also imbued with an international perspective, an understanding from the start that our strength would only work within international law. Fifty years ago we learned the lesson that going it alone was not working and we wanted to join the European Union to take a further step in our prosperity, security and culture. We were lucky that the Union allowed us in - not lucky, we added to the Union, bringing neutrality, that still sense of not wanting to be militarily aligned. That was important to the time as something we brought and added to the European Union.

There is also what we gained. Strategic decisions at the time to invest in education, back our enterprise and go with the European institutions delivered fantastically for our country. President Metsola mentioned John Hume appropriately. We are approaching the 25-year anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement and it is exactly the principle she mentioned, that coercion will not work in our desire for a united Ireland and that respect for diversity is a better way. We changed constitutionally and the vast majority of us voted significantly to take that approach. Now, 25 years on, we need to pause and consider where we are today and where we go for the next 25 and 50 years, recognising that our world is very insecure. Our security in Europe depends on the security of our neighbours in Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, right the way around. We must recognise also that Europe is at risk. In our economy we are seeing a tendency to import all our software from the United States, all our hardware from Asia and all our energy from Russia and the Gulf. We need to change.

President Metsola's address follows not that long after President von der Leyen addressed us. She said that she believes, and I believe the European Parliament thinks the same, that our future is in going green, the Green New Deal. There is the whole swathe of legislation the European Parliament has before it, the Fit for 55 package of legislative measures. I think there are 20 pieces of legislation that we are going to have to agree this year. That allows us to prepare for the future. It allows us to set the standard in aviation, maritime and digital policy where we need to get the constitutional rights of individuals stitched into the economic future. That is the key to success.

It allows us restore nature. We have lost half of all wildlife in the last 50 years. Nature here, as across our Union, has been destroyed. Unless we address that, everything will be lost, all the foundations of our prosperity and security will be cut from underneath us. President Metsola's presence today is important and there is important work for us all to do. The constitutional, rule of law system we have is incredibly complicated if we try to explain it, even for those involved in the middle of it. It is this trialogue process where the Commission, the Parliament and the Council, the three legs of representative democratic institutions, have to work together. Let us do that. President Metsola's presence is an important moment at an important time when we have to do that legislative work to create the rule of laws that will provide for people's prosperity. I thank her and her colleagues from the European Parliament who are here today for the work they are doing.

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