Lynn Boylan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the MEPs to the House. I know from my experience that it is incredibly hard to get anybody to pay any attention to the work they do. It often feels like being a hamster on a wheel. One problem is that although MEPs can attend the Joint Committee on European Union Affairs, which allows better scrutiny of European legislation, the timings never worked. If we have learned anything from Covid, we now know that we can do things remotely. We should certainly look at bringing MEPs to the European affairs committee on a more regular basis to feed into the legislative process before it is too late.

We know it is very convenient for governments to blame the EU when they do not want to do something. They very often say the EU will not let them. When something does happen, the excuse is often used that it was not because of governments but the EU. If we had proper scrutiny in advance of legislation and directives, it would remove that from the conversation. We are certainly seeing that now in the case of the ban on liquefied natural gas, LNG, terminals. The Attorney General says we cannot ban them because of EU law, when I have it in writing from the EU that they absolutely can be banned and that it is entirely up to a member state what energy mix it wants to have. As someone who is unapologetically critical of the EU, it is right to criticise it when it is wrong and to praise it when it is right. We owe it a lot in terms of the habitats and wildlife directives because our biodiversity is in a dire state in Ireland and it would be much worse if we did not have the protection of that legislation.

I will focus particularly on climate change. It is welcome that the EU is showing some leadership on this issue. While the EU is not ambitious enough, it is at least showing leadership in setting binding targets and increasing its ambition going into COP26. It is mind-blowing, however, that the EU continues to think it can modernise the Energy Charter Treaty. I would like to hear the MEPs' opinions on that modernisation process because the Energy Charter Treaty cannot be fit for a Paris-compliant future. It is not fit for purpose. It is a dinosaur agreement that was founded at a time when fossil fuels were the way to go and it now deserves to be buried alongside the fossil fuels it protects. Ireland ratified the treaty in 1994 without debate, which is interesting given that the Government tried to rush the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, CETA, through with a very short debate. Ireland is on the hook for investor-state dispute settlement, ISDS, challenges under this treaty and the Dutch are already being sued for billions of euro for phasing out coal power plants in their country. I would like to know the opinion of all the MEPs. Do they support the EU leaving the Energy Charter Treaty? What are their views on the fact that the EU is now trying to carve out a dispute so it cannot be sued inter-EU, but the Energy Charter Treaty is being used to protect European fossil fuel companies when they go into the global south by expanding that treaty into those countries?