Fine Gael MEP Mairead McGuinness has rejected the calls of French National Front MEP Marine Le Pen for France to have internal border controls in response to last week’s terrorist attack in Paris, saying the solution lies in resolving internal and global issues.
Ms McGuinness says Europe needs to fully understand the conflicts in the Middle East in order to tackle home-based threats from Islamic extremists.
Ms Le Pen, the leader of the Far-Right Front National party, this week called for France to take back full control of its borders.
On Monday, La Pen addressed the European parliament in Strasbourg and questioned France’s immigration policy.
She told the parliament “the EU has weakened us” against “Islamic fundamentalism”. Le Pen claimed the “total opening” of France’s borders was to blame for austerity and the subsequent weakening of France’s security apparatus.
"Is the total opening of our national borders the real way to control fundamentalism?" she said.
"Is it not the policies of austerity that have weekend our ability to respond? Or the disarming of our police and armies?"
Le Pen called for French citizens with dual-nationality to be stripped of their French citizenship if they travel abroad to fight.
"If we had kept our national borders, we would probably have been able to stop many of those who have travelled to fight in Syria or train in Yemen from coming back to French territory, as happened with at least one of the fundamentalist terrorists killed in recent days,” she said.
Le Pen is expected to run for the presidency in 2017.
However, Ms McGuinness said looking inwards won’t solve Europe’s security issues.
“The problems of France are from within France themselves,” she said, “and therefore the solutions have to come by France looking at the issues that have caused this.”
Ms McGuinness also called for attention to be paid to the global issues at root in such attacks. “The global questions as well – the problems in Syria, in Iraq, Iran, Libya – all of these countries have problems, and therefore there aren’t simple solution.”
On Wednesday al Qaeda’s Yemen branch claimed responsibility for the attacks, saying France “shared all of America’s crimes.”
As of yet there appears to be no evidence that the group were involved in organising or funding the attacks, according to an Associated Press report.
One of the attackers, Amedy Coulibaly, claimed an allegiance to ISIS in a video released two days after his death.
ISIS and al Qaeda have been rivals since a split in February 2014, following ISIS’s refusal to follow orders from al Qaeda’s command structure to restrain their attacks on civilians. The two groups are now battling each other in Syria.
