Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-11-17-Speech-1-177"
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"en.20081117.24.1-177"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, my fellow Members have already cited some examples. I should like to refer to some of them in order to introduce this subject, since we need to combat natural disasters. Who remembers what took place just a century ago, in 1908, in Messina, where 100 000 people died? Everyone obviously remembers Chernobyl, but if we focus on the last 10 years or so, there were the storms and the sinkings of 1999, the floods in Central Europe already cited just now, not to mention 11 September in New York, the terrorist attacks of March 2004, the problematic disease, chikungunya, and so on.
We are counting on your determination. We need it. You know that Parliament is behind you – this evening it has said so loud and clear. We shall now wait to receive results for a year’s time, without fail.
We do not know what the next disaster will be or on what scale it will be, but we are sure of one thing, and that is that there will soon be another disaster again.
When that time comes, our fellow citizens, who for 50 years have been used to seeing a supposedly united Europe being built – and a number of reports on which we have voted this week are testimony to this – will turn round and ask us the same question that they have been asking us regarding the current financial crisis: ‘but what have you done?’
Over the past few weeks some of you may have heard the former director of the International Monetary Fund explain in a previous report, from three or four years ago: ‘We said at the IMF that the crisis was going to happen, and we explained how to prevent it’.
So, Commissioner, this evening you have come to listen to us, and we hope that you will be able to hear us and to ensure that, unlike what is happening with regard to the current financial crisis, Europe will not be behind if a disaster occurs.
For my part I should like to make a twin proposal. Firstly, a proposal concerning the type of action to take. You said this in your closing remarks, Commissioner, you referred to the report by Michel Barnier.
We cannot have two separate actions, even though you yourself, like each of us, in particular within the Committee on Regional Development, are forever saying that we need integrated approaches. We cannot have development of the Solidarity Fund, on the one hand, and a prevention policy, on the other. The two should be linked, not least in order to convince these infamous ministers of finance, who explain to us that perhaps even if the Solidarity Fund criteria were adapted – and you spoke about this – it would cost more. They should draw inspiration from the Barnier report and they would understand that if, at the same time, we conducted a prevention policy by pooling the means of action and pooling accident and natural disaster prevention, then, we would save money.
Therefore, it is clearly a question not only of saving money and averting disasters, but above all of saving human lives – that really is the priority.
That is why, Commissioner, I, along with all my fellow Members, urge you to do your utmost to ensure that, at the end of the French Presidency and during the Czech Presidency, you obtain a genuine guarantee from the Swedish Presidency that the action plan will not just be studied, but launched."@en1
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