​European Alliance Group member and Cork city councillor,  Kieran McCarthy, calls  on the Latvian Presidency to ensure  stability at the EU's borders. "Europe is at a crossroads which is worrying people in cities such as my own in Cork but also across the length and breadth of the EU.  The unstable situation in Ukraine, the terrible terrorist killings in Paris - have people wondering where is Europe as the great peace project we have known it to be", he said during his inaugural plenary session of the Committee of the Region. 
 
Cllr. McCarthy also urged the Presidency to keep working on achieving security of energy supply and to ensure timely implementation and accessibility to small scale projects of the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI) in order to create jobs in local areas. "While we acknowledge that the return of investments could be higher in metropolitan areas, we don't want to see middle size, small cities and rural areas left behind. On energy security, we want the EU to harness the potential of all the existing energy mix and seize the opportunity of the oil prices bonanza to invest savings into cleaner energy sources and new promising technologies which could ensure self-sufficient and decentralised energy production systems in the next decades, he added.