Tom Clonan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted to welcome Commissioner McGuinness to the Seanad, especially on Europe Day 2023. The theme of Europe Day this year is peace and unity. As the Commissioner said in her opening remarks, formed just five years after the end of the Second World War, the European Coal and Steel Community, followed by the European Economic Community and then the EU, have amounted to an extraordinary and probably the greatest peace process in European and world history.

How unthinkable that must have seemed to our parents and grandparents. Imagine the animus and enmity of 1945, just five years before Schuman and Adenauer reached their agreement. There was the liberation of concentration camps throughout Europe, such as Dachau, Auschwitz and Treblinka. It was a time of such bestial violence on a global scale throughout Europe and Asia, culminating in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How unthinkable and unimaginable at that point it must have seemed that peace, co-operation and reconciliation in Europe would be possible. However, our Irish and European grandparents had a vision for reconciliation, peace and prosperity, and it has prevailed. It is a remarkable feat of human and political ingenuity, knowing that nothing is impossible.I am sorry to say that today in Moscow, Vladimir Putin has threatened that we in Europe and Russia have reached a turning point. A war, as he says, has been unleashed on Russia. There is no war on Russia. There is no war on the Russian people, only resistance to tyranny. The people of Ukraine are fighting for their freedom, for their very survival, and for exactly those values we hold in the European Union, namely, the freedom to assembly, self-determination, prosperity, peace and hope. These are values we may have taken for granted for some period. In the tumult of the war in Ukraine, we have so much talk about weapon systems, 155 mm artillery shells, main battle tanks from all around Europe and the United States, high mobility artillery rocket systems, HIMARS, and now there is also a threat to Europe's largest nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia. We must remember in the EU that our most powerful weapon against tyranny is prosperity, our values and our unity in the face of aggression, oppression and injustice. We must remember at this low point, however unimaginable it may seem, that peace is possible and it is something we should seek out. Putin will not be here forever but the people of Russia will and, hopefully, the people of the EU and Ukraine. Putin is correct that this is a turning point but not the one he refers to. It is not a change in the world order. A turning point in his failed invasion of Ukraine has been reached and in the coming weeks, Ukrainian men and women will act decisively and unambiguously in Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk. As our grandparents and parents have observed, tyrants come and go. Hitler, Mussolini, Ceauescu were all seemingly impregnable. They were so-called hard men with fragile egos and brittle ambitions but they unravelled very quickly as will Putin and Lukashenko. These leaders will be relics of the 20th century. They are the very distillation of toxic patriarchal expression. In many ways, Commissioner McGuinness and her colleagues in Europe are the very opposite of what that represents. They have brought us into a dynamic 21th century. I was six years old when Ireland entered the European Economic Community 50 years ago and my first experience of it was the litre and the metre in senior infants. In her capacity as Commissioner of financial services, I would like to point out that decimalisation helped me greatly with my communion money, which I still have. Unfortunately, the meter stick replaced the imperial 12-inch ruler and in the hands of the Christian Brothers, it was a more formidable weapon for which I have Europe to thank.

Finally, I was a guest of the Commissioner's approximately 12 years ago in Europe at a forum on economic recovery. Afterwards, I left my hotel to go for a walk and found a little café to get a takeaway coffee. When I went in, lo and behold, the Commissioner was at the back having a meal on her own. We had a brief chat and she told that the travelling was tough and that it was tough on the family. As our longest-serving MEP, previously Vice-President of the European Parliament, and now a Commissioner, I thank her for her public service. I also thank all our other MEPs, both men and women, and all the staff and the Irish citizens in the European agencies and in the Commission who do great work. In this multipolar world, we live in a space between hope and fear but our membership of the Union makes us citizens of hope. Long may that continue.