I was glad to speak in favour of staying within the European Union at the Council meeting tonight. The EU has given us countless economic, social and cultural benefits and opened opportunities for us to showcase Belfast through Eurocities and other networks and staying within the EU is vital for Northern Ireland to develop and prosper. The European Union of course is based on the principle of subsidiarity, that democratic decisions should be taken at the level of government that is closest to communities they concern, so it’s appropriate that local government is taking a lead here.
The European Union is however more than an economic arrangement, it is also fundamentally about values. Those core values of respect for rights and human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law are ones that we should all strive to bring into being in Northern Ireland.
Anyway speech below.
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Belfast City Council has been successfully engaged in Europeans affairs for over 20 years going back to the Urban I and Urban II projects in the 1980s, the Belfast in Europe programme and our EU Unit established in 2004 was first dedicated EU resource in Local Govt on whole of island of Ireland.
We have benefited massively from such engagement, bringing together a wide variety of groups from across Northern Ireland to influence European Regional policy, facilitating access to funding and programmes and learning from and sharing our knowledge through the Eurocities network.
And so I am glad to be able to speak in favour of remaining in the EU, because the overarching benefits of membership are clear to me as a councillor when I visit European funded community projects, use European subsidised services and see our local business access the 500 million strong European single market
And it is clear to me that leaving this single market would, at one stroke make a mockery of our years of efforts to attract Foreign Direct Investment to Northern Ireland? The exact type of investment that is vital for us if we wish to escape the low productivity, low value, low wage equilibrium that has trapped us for generations.
And of course what effect would this have on our city’s economic links with that other great city on this island? It is not a coincidence that the sectors that have seen the greatest growth in Dublin and across the Republic – Life & Health Sciences, Agrifood, Advanced Engineering to name a few, are the exact sectors that form the core of the Northern Ireland Economic Strategy.
And we should remember that over two thirds of FDI employment in the Republic is by American firms. FDI in the Republic is not European companies seeking to be closer to the Atlantic but American companies using Ireland as an Atlantic bridge to access Europe.
There is a suggestion from some quarters that that a withdrawal from the European Union would somehow allow us to increase our international trade. The weakness in this argument is of course that membership of the EU does not restrict our current ability to trade with the rest of the world. Invest NI regularly sends trade missions to emerging and established economies across the world.
In fact in a few short weeks Invest NI is leading its latest international mission, this time to Saudi Arabia. But this Lord Mayor neatly illustrates another part of the European question. What values is it that we hold dear?
Do we wish to remain part of a continental alliance that prioritises health, education and cooperation, or do we go chasing after countries such as Saudi Arabia which quite aside from its bankruptcy by the low global oil price, is a country that stones women to death for practising “witchcraft”, beheads pro-democracy and LGBT activists and according to the US State Department remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaida, the Taliban and other terrorist groups.
The European Union is more than an economic arrangement, it is also fundamentally about values. Those core values of respect for rights and human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law are ones that we should all strive to bring into being in Northern Ireland.
The EU is a coalition that despite having only 7% of the world’s population has 25% of the global GDP and accounts for over 50% of the worlds spend on Welfare. When we hear about the recent leaks from Panama showing eye watering amounts of money being diverted away from public finances – do we think that this issue of social responsibility can be best tackled by individual countries in isolation?