The Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald has said Ireland should be at the forefront of the European Union, praising the EU for its handling of the Covid pandemic and for its support for Ireland during the Brexit negotiations.
However, in a major speech on Europe at the Institute for International and European Affairs in Brussels she criticised what she called the growing militarisation of the EU.
She told the audience: "Ireland is a proud and ancient European nation. Our future is not only to be part of the European Union but to be at the very forefront of the European project, driving change and improvements that benefit progress, prosperity, and the uplift of ordinary citizens."
Ms McDonald said Ireland's EU membership had "coincided" with the transformation of Ireland from one of Europe’s poorest countries to one of economic progress and progressive social change.
"There have been many positive advances in the areas of equality, workers' rights, and environmental standards. Let it be said that membership of the European Union was the catalyst for the advancement of the rights of women in Ireland and for our uplift as equal citizens," she said.
However, she criticised what she called "growing militarisation, deregulation, privatisation, and the reflexive unleashing of austerity at times of economic crisis."
When it was pointed out that the EU had agreed big public spending commitments to deal with the pandemic, the climate goals and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, she accepted that the EU had moved quickly and had supported people in need.
In her speech, she blamed unnamed individuals "who used crises as alibis to retreat into narrow thinking and to block progress."
She said they wanted to "cut our way out of economic difficulty and assert that working people must pay the heavy price, to say that we must arm our way out of military conflict, to say that Ireland should surrender our neutrality."
She told the audience: "They’re wrong. Our future, Ireland’s future in Europe, is too big and too bright for such a retreat."
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In a question and answer session, Ms McDonald was asked to reconcile her support for Ukraine with her opposition to what she called the militarisation of Europe.
She said: "It is hugely, hugely damaging to the European project where from the perspective of the ordinary citizen, huge resources, huge efforts are made and investment made in military capacity, in the armaments industry, at a time where a huge amount of our citizens are still hungry."
The EU has provided almost €5 billion in lethal and non-lethal support for Ukraine through an off-budget mechanism known as the European Peace Facility (EPF), whereby member states, including Ireland, contribute to the fund and are then reimbursed for weapons sent to Ukraine.
Despite her criticism of the EU’s policy on armaments, the Sinn Féin leader declined, in an interview with RTÉ News ahead of her speech, to repeat a 2020 manifesto commitment to pull Ireland out of the EU’s military cooperation platform known as PESCO and Partnership for Peace, the peacekeeping platform under NATO command which Ireland joined in 1999.
Asked why there was no mention of such commitments in her speech, she said: "I want us to start our conversation from a more positive position. What the state needs to do is to dial up our stance and our reputation and standing as a military neutral and as a non-aligned state."
She said this would involve neutrality being enshrined in the Irish constitution, and that it should also appear in EU treaties.
Asked if an EU rapid reaction capacity could have airlifted Irish citizens from Sudan, where the Government had to rely on French and Spanish assistance, Ms McDonald said:
"What's needed is capacity in Ireland to take care of, and to evacuate, our citizens when that arises. In the case of Sudan we shouldn’t have to rely on anybody to get there and to evacuate our citizens."
She said the Irish Defence Forces required "very substantial" investment and that Ireland had had to rely on others because successive governments had not invested in Ireland’s military capacity.
Ms McDonald also hinted that after the next European Parliament elections in 2024, the party may not automatically return to the radical Left group in the parliament.
She told RTÉ News: "The first job for Sinn Féin and for everyone else in the European elections is to get a bigger and stronger mandate.
"That's the case for us. It's the case for everybody else. And then after that, we will, as we have always done, assess this situation. And for us, it's a question of positioning ourselves in the best possible way to advance positive politics, progressive politics, and also Irish interests."
