Joe O'Toole (Independent)

On my first visit to the European Parliament many years ago, I met a Member of the Parliament from a town in Germany which was just across the border from Strasbourg. I asked him whether the European Parliament was anything more than a talking shop. He asked me to wait so he could introduce me to a French colleague and then told me that their fathers had literally been shooting at each other across a local river during the Second World War. The image was so important that it never left me because the EU guarantees peace within its borders. The point made by Simon Coveney, MEP, is correct. How can we justify standing back and doing nothing when faced with conflicts? Have we not been reared to believe that evil will triumph if good people do nothing?

The EU has benefited us culturally and guaranteed our identity. However, it has not benefited us in other areas such as fishing rights agus is mór an náire dúinn nár dheineamar beart ar son na Gaoluinne. Theip orainn sa mhéid sin, agustáimid fós ag iarraidh an fód a sheasamh. Ní fheadar an bhfuil buaite againn.

On the other hand, as Senator Henry has noted, the EU has greatly benefited us on issues like labour rights, health and safety issues and equality for women. We would never have made the progress that we did without the EU. The EU has clearly benefited us economically and opened up a market that was never there before. It has reduced our dependence on the UK as most of our trade before our entry into the EEC was with the UK. The UK is still a very important trading partner but we now have access to the European market.

Mary Lou McDonald, MEP, trotted out the easy line about the special place of NATO and the problems of a federal Europe. If someone talks to me about a federal Europe, I ask him or her to define what he or she is talking about, to tell me the difference between a confederation and a federation, to tell me what he or she is worried about and to put neutrality in the context of ethics, commitment, honesty and fairness. The moment when I began to question my commitment to Irish neutrality more than at any other time was when I watched people being slaughtered in Kosovo while nobody did anything about it. We are supposed to believe that doing nothing was the right course of action. There were no ethical grounds for the position we took at that time. I believe in neutrality in a perfect world but if we see wrong being done, we should take action.

It is wrong to sit back and let NATO and the United States do what they have done twice in the Middle East and continue to do around the world. If a balance is not achieved in foreign policy, we will reap a poor reward down the line. We need to become involved in foreign policy, which should be carried out very slowly and correctly. My position on neutrality, which I have held for many years, is severely threatened by what I have seen around the world over the past ten or 15 years. These two things do not marry well. The way to deal with conflict is by democratic means through United Nations with a democratic mandate, which it does not have at the moment, and a foreign policy in Europe that is democratically arrived at and does not give a special place to NATO. We should move towards a confederation, which is quite different from a federation and would secure national and European boundaries.