Post European Council Meeting: Statements
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-22
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Thomas Byrne (FF), Meath East

I fully agree. Orbán basically wrecked the economy. It shows that the link between adherence to the rule of law and democratic values and a free media is essential for economic growth.
We did not get involved in the election. We did not tell the Hungarian people how to vote. We were very careful about that, even though the temptation was very strong. Over many years, the Taoiseach, Deputy Micheál Martin, and I and various Ministers who have been in government have been very strong in calling out what the Hungarians are doing. That included negotiating the conditionality regulation and working at my Council on rule-of-law issues and holding Hungary to account for some of the things its government had done, which were opposed to the foundational values of the European Union.
All of that had resulted in over €17 billion of funds being withheld from Hungary. I met Hungarian politicians from the cities, which would not be as Orbánist as the rural areas, and they were crying out for the money. They really felt their areas were losing out big time because of this and their economy was losing out. We had to take a hard line, though. The Hungarian people have reacted. They realised that Orbán had taken them to a place where they should not really have been. I say again that Péter Magyar was not allowed on the television, which is incredible. I met Mr. Magyar in Munich at the security conference a couple of months ago. I had a brief conversation with him and wished him the best of luck but I did not encourage anyone to vote for him. He did that himself. Looking back at how he did his campaign over a year and a half, it is an incredible example of coming from almost nothing to getting two thirds of the vote by sheer persistence.
I discussed this with the Taoiseach before I spoke today. Our view is we should be generous to the Hungarian people. We should give them the value for the vote they have taken and work with them very quickly. It will be a task for our EU Presidency to unlock those funds. Obviously, there has to be some conditionality attached to that to make sure Hungary reverses some of what has happened. There is a generosity required and Ireland will benefit because Hungarian people will be spending money and seeking products and services, many of which will come from Ireland, if we are honest about it. This will benefit us too.

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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/2026-04-22/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:51+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-22