When we talk about accession, there is a whole set of conditionalities, including environmental and social conditionalities. These are the measures with regard to participation in the European Union, and I am worried that we may end up with a contradiction where the money is telling them to do one thing but the accession process is asking them to achieve things. We know from Ireland that if you have these very blunt austerity measures attached that you create problems down the line. It is one of the reasons we do not have enough doctors, teachers and so forth. There was a freeze for so long that we ended up losing our pipeline. That is an example of an economic measure that undermined our social cohesion and the social services we need. Similarly, I am concerned that we do not have control, not necessarily in the IMF but in terms of the EU funds, of these very substantial investment loans. Again the EU has its record too, for example, when Greece was forced to sell ports to China to privatise. When you think of it, it was strategic foolishness that in order to achieve short-term repayments, we were losing ports at the very edge of Europe.

There are some within the European Union who have learned the lessons of austerity. We saw during Covid that it was recognised that sometimes you need to invest in a wider way. I wonder how Ireland will monitor to ensure that we do not end up at counter purposes, whereby on one level we are looking to raise the standards in these social and environmental areas in Ukraine to support accession, and on the other level, the country may be put under huge pressure with regard to austerity or other conditionalities, specifically privatisation.