Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for her speech. To be fair, it is almost impossible to try to address a topic as broad as this in statements. A number of weeks ago I had asked for statements on the benefits of Europe and that was extended in this debate to the benefits on the future of Europe, which is fine. When I made that point on the Order of Business, I wanted people to remember all of the reasons we should not do what our nearest neighbours have done or even go anywhere near that. Sometimes we take for granted all of the good things and we forget about all of the benefits that Ireland - as a state, a country and a people - has received. I have endless briefing notes, as do other Members, but I will try not to rely on them too much and just articulate some of the points I feel we need to remember.

We talk about the four freedoms: the freedom of movement of goods, services, capital and people. People forget just how big the freedom to travel is, with their purple passport giving pretty much unfettered access to the greater European Continent. In fact, the EU passport also brings people very easily to other places like Switzerland and Norway that are not in the EU. Most people of my generation and that of the Minister of State do not ever remember anything other than a purple passport, and most of us of a certain age probably never had a green passport. Senator Buttimer might just have achieved one but perhaps he also only had a purple passport. He is smiling, in any case. There are certainly many of us who never had a passport other than a purple one. It gives us all great freedom to move and to work, that is, to turn up in any of the EU states and be entitled to get a job and work legally, pay our dues, be registered to work and get all the benefits, such as social insurance, which is very important. We forget that.

In her speech, the Minister of State pointed out that deregulation of air travel is an EU function. Ryanair would not be Ryanair if it was not able to fly to the various hubs in all of the EU countries and some non-EU countries. I am old enough to remember when we had a very regulated aviation market and we had a suggestion of, if not a cartel, then cartel-like behaviour among certain airlines, where it cost the current equivalent of €1,000 to fly to London if one did not want to stay a Saturday night or go on an apex fare or some other very complicated kind of fare. The benefits to all of us of being able to get on an aeroplane for, by and large, a fairly reasonable price in the context of what they were in the past, is something an awful lot of people have forgotten about.

There is the Erasmus programme from which so many people have benefited over many years. My mother was an Erasmus co-ordinator in UCD for many years and really enjoyed that part of her role in bringing in students from France, Germany, Holland and various other EU countries at the time, which would have been before the accession of the new countries in 2004. We must remember the benefits they got from coming to Ireland and the knowledge they gained. Equally, Irish students went abroad and learned lots of other things about their own brief, whether they were studying business, social sciences, arts or law, and gained a great understanding of other countries.

We sometimes forget a lot of our social legislation to do with equality, for example, on equal pay and equal treatment, gender equality and so on, came from the EU. Many of those debates started and were encouraged in Europe and they brought Ireland to a place we would not have got to as quickly if the EU - the EEC, as some of us would have known it - was not there to stimulate those debates. Equally, environmental standards, food standards and the nitrates, noise pollution, air pollution and landfill directives - all of the things that make the quality of our existence better - are things we might have found difficult to implement ourselves if we did not have somebody suggesting we do it, and maybe contemplating fines or other sanctions if we did not do it. I think all of us are happy with this, whether in regard to having less smoky coal in the atmosphere or better noise quality, air quality or water quality standards.

We could go back and look at the figures for 1973, when Ireland, under a Fianna Fáil Government, joined the EEC, and look at where we were as an economy relative to the rest of Europe and where we are now in terms of performance. In the 1990s, when I was working and training as an accountant, Ireland's population of a little more than 3 million accounted for less than 1% of what was then a smaller EU population of some 320 million, yet we were getting 35% of all the American foreign direct investment in Europe. That was partially because we had great graduates and partially because we spoke the English language and for other cultural reasons, but those companies were in Ireland not just for any tax rate but because they had access to a wider market. People forget that if we were not part of the EU, they could not have come here. They were here to be a presence in an economy that was part of Europe and could trade freely with the rest of that market, which ultimately expanded with the accession of ten countries in 2004, two more in 2007 and another in 2013, and there are still candidate countries looking to join the EU.

I was at the OECD last year and I met a lady from Iceland who told me a pro-EU party is being set up in Iceland. I told her that is probably because Iceland is not in it and if it was, there would probably be some anti-EU party. There are many countries, other than our nearest neighbour, clearly, that would love to be and aspire to be part of the EU.We also forget and take for granted our fantastic motorway programme. Those motorways were built when my party was in government between 2004 and 2010. They allow Senators Burke and Buttimer to get home to Cork faster than they would have previously. I refer to motorways to Cork, Limerick, Galway, Waterford and Belfast. Much of that programme was funded by objective 1 status many years ago, when the entire country had that status. When we separated the country, in the late 1990s, between objective 1 and non-objective 1, significant funding went into areas in need of it. It went towards developing water infrastructure, roads, airports, tourism-related products, etc.