Post European Council Meeting: Statements
Dail Éireann — 2025-03-26
============================================================

Gary Gannon (SD), Dublin Central

As we are discussing post-EU Council statements I am glad it is the Minister of State who has joined us. Earlier we brought a motion on the triple lock and during his contribution the Minister of State accused me and members of my party of being anti-EU. He went further and almost compared us to Farage. That was an interesting point. I did not see the Minister of State doing any of the kind of rebuilding that members of my party had to do following the far-right protests and agitation in our constituencies. As for our being anti-EU, that simply has not been the case with the Social Democrats from our foundation. Deputies Gibney, Hearne and I all contested European elections on pro-EU platforms because we understand that, as the Minister of State mentioned, it was a vehicle for peace. As we are pro-EU we wanted to stand for the values of what we understand the EU to be in its original conception, which was as a vehicle for peace. What we dispute is the change happening now where there is an arms build-up. There are very clearly weapons races. The Minister of State criticised my colleague, Deputy Hearne, for his contribution last week on having a war on poverty, but it is for that very reason we are pro-EU.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-03-26/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:53:38+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-03-26