Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-10-19-Speech-2-601"
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"en.20101019.24.2-601"2
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"Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, my sympathy, of course, goes out to the victims of this disaster. As a member of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety, when I read in the newspaper that red sludge had escaped from a reservoir there, I asked myself how something like this could possibly happen, because for years we have been adopting rules and legislation in order to isolate and contain precisely this kind of toxic substance to ensure that this sort of thing does not happen. Clearly something has gone wrong here, and clearly there are people responsible who have not implemented the rules and legislation of the European Union. In that case, we quite simply have to call these people to account. The question of who was, and who was not, responsible needs to be answered.
I admire the Hungarian people, who responded very quickly and averted an even bigger disaster. However, that must not mean that we leave everything as it is. We must determine who was responsible and these people must be named and shamed.
We must not – and I would warn against doing this – alter the Solidarity Fund now on account of this incident. It was established in 2002 when the floods happened. We have rules, and we cannot shift the mismanagement of one country to Europe and allow the damage to be paid for here. That must not be the result of this. That is not the purpose of the Solidarity Fund. It is intended to be used for unforeseeable events that can quite simply just happen. We need to keep funds in readiness for these events and not for incidents such as the one that has just occurred in Hungary.
However, I would like to make a suggestion. When the floods occurred in 2002, we did not even have a Solidarity Fund and we were able to use resources from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), together with a reduction in cofinancing in this area, for example. That also helps the countries by enabling them to use their resources for other things. We could therefore take a different path here in order to make these funds available. The Commission ought to follow this recommendation."@en1
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