Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I support everything that my colleague, Senator McDowell, has just said. I was going to bring the matter up. In our debate on the Northern Ireland protocol yesterday, I mentioned that there had been very little public consideration of the role of the Court of Justice of the European Union, its relevance to costs and the element of delay that it brings into the consideration of legal matters affecting Irish people. This is not to deny that the Court of Justice of the European Union is necessary but we think very little about it and very few people would be able to name the Irish State’s sole representative on that court. The point is that people see the European Union primarily as a guarantor of commerce, trade, markets, environmental protection, quality of medicines and things that affect us all as a community. There will be a whole new swathe of people considering the role of the European Union in our lives and considering the role of European courts if a European court makes a decision that interferes with the ability of Irish authorities to investigate and prosecute serious crime. There will be a whole new element to the debate about the European Union and its role in our lives. I hope common sense will prevail. As Senator McDowell has said, there has already been a very unhelpful overreach by the European Union in such areas. When we come to have discussions about Poland and Hungary, and they are frequently mentioned in dispatches in this House and in The Irish Times, we rarely get into the granular detail of the difficulties which those countries have with overreach by European Union institutions in areas which are properly left to consideration by member states. I have no doubt that there will be elements of right and wrong on both sides and that nobody will agree with each other 100%, but we need to have a more careful consideration of how the European Union impacts our lives, for good in many cases, but as we are seeing now in this particular instance, also for ill. I will leave for another day the other point I was going to make.