The Government is hoping to help Ukraine make “substantial, historic” progress on its bid to join the European Union in the coming years, the Taoiseach has said.
In an address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Micheál Martin said Europe’s values were being “systemically questioned” and it needed to defend the rule of law and democracy.
Martin was delivering a speech to MEPs on Ireland’s priorities for its presidency of the EU Council, a six-month role that involves brokering compromises and helping to steer the Brussels agenda.
The Taoiseach said the Government would put a lot of focus on the debate about the future enlargement of the EU during its presidency.
“We will aim to complete accession negotiations with Montenegro, to make substantial, historic progress with Moldova and Ukraine,” he said.
Last month, EU states agreed to open Ukraine’s first “cluster” of negotiating chapters in the years-long accession process that precedes a new country joining the union.
The Ukrainian government is hopeful the five other “clusters”, covering a wide range of required reforms, will be opened during Ireland’s EU presidency.
Ireland would support “tighter and stronger” economic sanctions targeting Russia, “so that its cruel and morally indefensible war can no longer be sustained”, the Taoiseach said.
Negotiations about the EU’s common budget too often descended into a “zero-sum” struggle between successful existing funding schemes and pressure to spend money in new pressing areas, Martin said.
“One of our union’s greatest weaknesses is that we place such high demands on it but are unwilling to fund it appropriately,” he said.
Landing a political deal by the end of the year on the size and shape of the EU’s next seven-year budget will be a big challenge for the Irish presidency.
A proposed €1.7 trillion pot has been criticised by fiscally conservative states for being too large, and by countries who are net beneficiaries of EU funds as too limited.
“There are very different views around the table, both about how we raise our money, and how we spend it,” the Fianna Fáil leader said in his speech to MEPs.
The behaviour of Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s government was “increasingly extreme” and the humanitarian situation in Gaza remained dire, Martin also said.
“There are no democratic or humanitarian values which are flexible enough to justify the scale of death, destruction and displacement we have seen,” he said.
“It is a cause of deep and justified sadness and anger to many that Europe has not done enough to put pressure on Israel in the light of its egregious actions,” he said.
He said he understood the Israel-Palestine situationwas a “difficult topic” for some countries, but the EU simply had to do more.
Martin used his address to parliament to reference John Hume, who he said was “unquestionably one of the greatest figures in modern Irish history”, and remained the only MEP to have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while serving in the European Parliament.
Iratxe García Pérez, who leads the centre-left Socialists and Democrats, the second largest grouping in parliament, challenged the Taoiseach over the Irish Government’s record on housing and homelessness in a debate afterwards.
The Spanish MEP said she learned about the huge concentration of homeless families living in emergency accommodation on Gardiner Street in Dublin during a recent visit to Ireland. “Parents are raising children in a single room,” she said. “Children do their homework sitting on the fire escape.”
Sinn Féin MEP Lynn Boylan, speaking on behalf of the parliament’s Left grouping, said the Government had mounted a “full-scale attack” on Irish neutrality and had become caught up in Europe’s “militarisation agenda”.