Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit. I note that in Brussels in March, the key areas were again Ukraine and the €195 billion or so in support. Since then, we have had the Hungarian election, which, as others have noted, will hopefully free things up. I hope that at the informal meeting in Cyprus tomorrow and the day after, we will receive some signs of positive engagement from the Hungarian side, if we have not already done so.

Sentiment score: 0.51

I missed that because I was at a committee meeting. It is fantastic to hear. The Middle East is going to come up again, I am sure, just as it did before. You never know from one day to the next what is going to happen. The last thing I heard related to the status of the blockade. I know matters are complex because of the historical and neighbourly relations some member states have with Israel, but we seem to be letting the genocide, the occupation of Gaza and the occupied territories fall through the cracks. I am aware that the Irish Government will say this is not a debate on the occupied territories Bill and that I have raised it before, but we have got to keep moving on this. We can have the argument over whether services should be included during the debate on the legislation, but let us get to the stage where the legislation is coming up. On engagement with our European colleagues, the matter of Israel seems to have gone even further down the agenda. It needs to be kept as topical as possible. Issues like security and defence were also mentioned at the March meeting. It is in the EU's security interest not to have a belligerent Israel and to have a more settled, long-term peace plan, which might not suit the Netanyahu Administration but might suit the Israeli people going forward, as well as the Palestinians, obviously. The other issues I want to focus on, which did not get discussed in Brussels but which I understand are coming up in the next couple of days, are the multi-annual financial framework and the long-term budget. Getting the framework right definitely has potential to provide some security in uncertain times. Another area that is relevant concerns energy security and high fossil fuel prices, which are very topical right now. I have mentioned this in this Chamber during the debate on the fuel crisis but I reiterate that we need to see more movement from Europe on long-term energy security. I have criticised the Government constantly for not investing in long-term offshore wind, tidal and wave energy, storage capacity off the west coast for conversion to hydrogen and battery storage. We could be a massive exporter of energy. I want to try this angle as well: perhaps there needs to be an EU Cohesion Fund that would ramp up our energy production capacity as part of a European energy security network. In this regard, we would get some funding not from private corporations but from member states to have a kind of a quid pro quo 50:50 arrangement whereby we would still have enough capacity to sell to gain revenue from data storage companies. Some of the funding would come from Europe directly to build up scale and the energy would then go automatically through the French interconnector or by whatever means are necessary. This is because we need to ramp up our energy security from a national level but also from a European level. I am not sure whether the Minister of State got to comment on the meeting in May. I might not be in the Chamber to hear his response but I will have a look at the transcript later. I am referring to the meeting in May of the European Political Community that involves 47 member states. It is a wider body that is not on a statutory basis. Could the Minister of State put on the record the level of engagement not just with the EU accession states but also with countries that are not anywhere in the pipeline for EU accession? What enhanced co-operation and economic pooling can we have on a Europe-wide basis, excluding, obviously, the countries that are not involved, which include Russia and Belarus? We are talking about the likes of Armenia, Georgia, Türkiye, Moldova and Ukraine. Some of them are EU accession states, but there is a lot of potential on an EU level for enhanced co-operation.

Sentiment score: 0.21