Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I welcome President von der Leyen to the Dáil and to Ireland. I appreciate her comments about Europe's commitment to ensuring that there will be no hard Border on the island of Ireland or that the exit of Britain from the EU should not in any way adversely impact on the peace on this island. To be honest, nobody out there in the world would thank me if we used this opportunity just to slap each other on the back. With that in mind, I am going to raise some issues in respect of which I think there is concern about and necessary criticism of the EU.

To take up the final point made by Deputy Shortall, we are suffering an absolutely devastating housing and homelessness crisis in this country. What is going on is shameful. I refer to the number of people in emergency accommodation and suffering hardship as a result of this housing crisis. While much of the responsibility lies with successive Governments failing to address it, a large component of the responsibility also lies with the decisions taken by the European Commission and the ECB, as part of the troika, to ram billions worth of austerity down the throats of the people of this country, which has left us with this legacy of an utterly devastating housing crisis. It is long past time that the EU acknowledged its mistakes in imposing that austerity and devastating consequences it has had.

I also note that this week the President has called - I support her in this - for a tribunal to be established to investigate the undoubted war crimes of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. We all condemn the utterly barbaric and murderous invasion of Ukraine by Russia. We support the people of Ukraine in their struggle for self-determination. I must say, however, in the week when there is the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, for the President to not call simultaneously for an investigation into the ongoing war crimes and crimes against humanity being committed by the apartheid state of Israel against Palestinian people makes me wonder about the consistency of the ethics of the EU's foreign policy. It is utterly unconscionable that we can say, on the one hand, that we must investigate the war crimes and atrocities of Vladimir Putin but remain silent, as the President did when she spoke in June in Israel beside the then Israeli Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, and not say a word after we have had two devastating reports from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch on 70 years of ongoing crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and the siege of Gaza, which was a 15-year long criminal action. Do we talk about investigating the war crimes of Israel? No. Do we sanction Israel for these crimes, as we have sanctioned Russia? No. Instead, we continue to give Israel favoured nation trade status, import great amounts of gas from it, deepen relations with it and engage in considerable military and defence trade with it. This is all with the state that is doing what I described to the Palestinians.

I also find it remarkable when we say that we must break our dependence on Russian fossil fuels, including oil, when, at the same time, we are increasing our imports of Saudi oil. Ironically, Saudi Arabia has this year doubled its imports of Russian oil and is effectively laundering it. We are now importing more oil from the Saudi dictatorship - one of the most brutal dictatorships in the world - which, just like Vladimir Putin, has engaged in a 15-year long war against Yemen that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people.Leading European states continue to arm that regime. Indeed, Dr. von der Leyen herself, in 2015, went over and signed a defence arrangement with Saudi Arabia when she was Minister of Defence in Germany. If we are to condemn, as we must, the war crimes of Putin, we must simultaneously condemn all war crimes and all crimes against humanity, even when they are committed by people that the European Union perceives as allies, such as Israel, Saudi Arabia or those that arm and support them.

Finally, in that regard, it is similarly unconscionable when the European courts have found against the EU-Moroccan trade agreement, which involves essentially taking the fish and mineral resources of the occupied Western Sahara people, that the EU Commission has lodged a legal appeal against its own courts in order to continue a trade deal that is robbing the people of Western Sahara of their resources while they are subject to an illegal occupation of their land and territory. President, we must have consistency in our foreign policy, in our ethics and in our morality if we are to be taken seriously as defenders of human rights and opponents of war.