Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions
Dail Éireann — 2026-06-30
============================================================

Micheál Martin (FF), Cork South-Central

Ireland will assume the Presidency of the European Union. The three fundamental pillars of our Presidency will be competitiveness, values and security.
On competitiveness, we are looking for a capital markets union. We will try to advance that agenda to enable Irish small- and medium-sized companies to get access to a far greater degree of venture capital in Europe. We hope we can establish - Commissioner Michael McGrath is pursuing this - the 28th regime or European Inc., which would basically mean that SMEs would be established on a pan-European basis from day one. We want to deepen the Single Market because Irish workers and people have benefited from it. We also want to simplify regulation to enable economic growth across the European Union.
The European Union has been transformative for Ireland since we voted to join in 1972 and joined in 1973. It has been a transformative experience economically for Ireland and, among most populations across Europe, Ireland has enjoyed probably the highest pro-European Union sentiment on a consistent basis over the years.
Many on the left have opposed the European Union and every treaty to do with it. That is their right and entitlement, but Europe is a far broader story than the one the Deputy painted.
Fundamentally, we will be endeavouring to see if we can help the agenda of making Europe more competitive on the industrial front and technology front to create jobs for people and to protect the jobs Irish people already have. Many of our companies export to the European market. We export a lot of food to the European market. We export a lot of medical devices to the European market. We export a lot of pharmaceuticals to the European market. They are real jobs. Real Irish people depend on those jobs and depend on that market. The Deputy ignores all that and he has consistently ignored it in the context of the European agenda.
Let us come to what he claims is rearming and militarisation. What is happening? What happened in the past five years? Can the Deputy recall? Ukraine was invaded, violently, by Russia and without any provocation. It was a total violation of the UN Charter. What has that created across the eastern flank? How does the Deputy think Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Estonia feel? They do not have the geographic isolation we have here; we are far removed. They have a far greater existential fear of Russia than the Deputy or I have, even though we should be concerned in terms of technology and cybersecurity as well as subsea cable and gas connector sabotage.

---

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/2026-06-30/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:06+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-06-30