Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I join in congratulating the Minister of State on her new role and I look forward to engaging with her on the many dimensions of her new role.

Usually when I speak about the European Union on Europe Day or at European events, I speak about its extraordinary benefits and how important it was for Ireland to be part of the Union. I speak about the progressive laws and progress that we have seen in areas such as the environment, employment law and gender equality, how effective it has been in establishing new pressures and new norms that press European countries to raise their standards in all of these areas, and how effective and important it has been for Ireland. I also speak about the future of Europe, and I was very proud to be one of four Irish parliamentarians who took part in the Future of Europe process. I may return to this later. Today I must agree with Deputy Moynihan. When we speak about Europe Day, we need to look back to the bigger question not only of Ireland and its engagement, but the big question of why the European Union was important when it came into existence, what the context was and what the history was. This is why the thoughts we have, and the decisions we need to make, on Europe's future are crucial if it is to have a future.

The European Union was very important because it came from a bloody and brutal history. Sometimes this gets forgotten when we speak about Europe. Europe's history is bloody and brutal and not only in terms of wars. These wars include the Hundred Years' War, the Thirty Years' War, the First World War and its extraordinary loss of life and the Second World War with its horrors and the Holocaust. This is the history of Europe and these wars are not the only part of Europe's bloody history. There is also blood in Europe's history of colonialism. There are the 10 million dead in the Belgian Congo, the transatlantic slave trade with 12.5 million Africans loaded onto Atlantic slave ships, the German genocide in Namibia and the more than 500,000 of approximately 3 million Algerians who were killed by France. This is Europe's history.

People speak about feeling a bit ashamed if they do not have the same armies. There is a lot to feel ashamed about but there is also a lot to be proud of. Crucially, something to be proud of is the massive shift we saw following the horrors of the Second World War towards multilateralism at UN level and European level, which put humanity first and advocated a politics of principle, even where this does not suit the politics of big powers or interests.That is crucially important. I am looking at the reference to coal and steel, the founding documents, which are clear on why there was this impetus. It was not just to make money from coal and steel. The Schuman Declaration stated that the pooling of coal and steel "will change the destinies of those regions which have long been devoted to the manufacture of munitions of war, of which they have been the most constant victims." The entire project of the European Union was a shift away from war. It happened at the same time as the United Nations, which, in the first line of the preamble to its first founding treaty, determined that it was our to duty to protect "succeeding generations from the scourge of war." We are really at a frightening moment if, given the history of the European Union and that the greatest gift it has given has been peace and stability, we now have narratives about rearmament. We have Ursula von der Leyen speaking about the need to have rearmament and new defence projects around common European interests, not principles or international law. We had a period of time where interests and military might determined and shaped our global politics. It was hard won to move away from it.

The Horizon funding was mentioned. We also have attempts and proposals from the European Commission, which I hope have been properly pushed back because they have been widely rejected by civil society right across Europe, to have Horizon funding, which is civil funding for research and innovation that is meant to drive our collective response in areas like the huge existential threat of climate change, the need for social cohesion and the need for medical advances, blended with the defence fund and rerouted into the bottomless greedy pit that is the military industrial complex and its research demands and preferences.

We must bear in mind that the founding of the EU was about moving away from munitions. There is an idea that this is different because we are in unstable environment. It was an unstable political environment in the 1940s and 1950s. It is precisely the recognition Ireland had, which is why Ireland managed to drive the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. It is a myth that an arms race is what keeps people safe. It is actually when we centre power on principles and apply those principles. By the way, neutrality does not mean doing nothing or which side we are on. What it means is that we take principles, such as international law, and apply them equally to everyone, not because they are our trading partners or neighbours, such as Ukraine, but because they are international principles that we have agreed in terms of humanity. That is why the failure of the European Union to take any meaningful action in respect of Gaza is destroying European credibility internationally. The fact is we have an association agreement with Israel. Trading interests and profiteering still happening when Europe, which accounts for 25% of Israel's trade, has an incredibly strong tool that has not been used at a time when we see a ground invasion threatening 600,000 children in Rafah. That is not even being spoken about. Instead, we are having conversations about rearmament and the idea that we will just keep it from our borders, as if that is the solution, when we have policies that create death and destruction. We have climate policies that are driving desertification and financial interests that are contributing to conflict, as we have seen in Libya and elsewhere. That is another place for Europe.

We talk about European values, but Europe has to ask what those values are. I believe European citizens believe in European values. When I took part in the Future of Europe process, I was struck by the fact that citizens from Greece, France, Spain and elsewhere talked about the same things. They talked about equality, their goals with respect to how children would be treated, education and common values. They talked about the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and how it should be applied to everyone around the world. European citizens talked about how they want Europe to be good, but what we are hearing politically is that they want Europe to be strong and to win in a new, bad return to the old power politics of big powers, patronage and interests. That is not what the citizens were saying. They want a Europe they can be proud of. That is not a Europe that lets 27,000 people drown in the Mediterranean Sea since 2014. The Adriana disaster last year in which 600 migrants drowned was seen as nobody's responsibility. One of the people I spoke to left the Irish Naval Service after it stopped performing search and rescue. That person's heart was broken as a result of not being able to take part in saving lives any longer.

I believe in Europe and I am passionate about it. We cannot blame things on Brussels. We need to take responsibility for Europe's future. It was very well put that there are different histories and different perspectives. Ireland, as a neutral country, can speak to international law, remind Europe of the peace project, champion the idea of peace and be a link between Europe and the wider world, including those many parts of the wider world that have suffered historically under European countries. Ireland has an incredibly important moral role to play right now to ensure we have a European future of which we can all be proud and that genuinely represents values and not just interests.