Cypriot members of the European parliament on Tuesday addressed the chamber in Strasbourg for the first time since the wildfire which tore through the Limassol district and killed two people in July and demanded more help from the European Union to help the island, and the rest of the bloc, fight future wildfires.

Akel’s Giorgos Georgiou was the first Cypriot to speak and offered fierce criticism for the speech made by European Commissioner for crisis management Hadjia Lahbib at the beginning of the day’s session.

“I heard you use the word ‘shall’ 10 times and the word ‘must’ 20 times in your speech. The fires which burned Europe this year have proven that austerity policies are disastrous,” he said, before moving onto the matter of Cyprus.

“Cyprus unfortunately holds the lead, in a negative way, for the proportion of its total territory burned in the last decade, at 104 square kilometres. We did not see your solidarity. We asked for two planes from Spain, which, after three months, have not yet arrived,” he said.

He added that while the Cypriot government “bears enormous responsibility” for the damage caused by this summer’s wildfire and previous large-scale wildfires which hit the island in previous years, “responsibility has clearly not been taken, since none of the responsible ministers resigned”.

However, he said, the EU itself is not blameless.

“Since 2016, we, the Left group, have been calling for a European air firefighting base to be established in Cyprus. You are outrageously ignoring us. Instead of social policy, you blame everything on climate change and individual responsibility,” he said.

He said the EU’s joint firefighting and disaster rescue mechanism, known as rescEU, “perpetuates the shortages of EU countries, recycling scarce resources”.

Elam’s Geadis Geadi also criticised the rescEU mechanism, saying it “left Europe, from Spain to Cyprus, at the mercy of the firestorm”, before outlining his proposal to improve the EU’s response to wildfires.

Those measures include the creation of “a strong pan-European fire brigade and a cooperation mechanism between the member states”, as well as stricter penalties for those who start fires “maliciously” and an increase in European funding for victims of wildfires.

He was then asked by French MEP Gregory Allione of the centrist Renew group, himself a firefighter by profession, to clarify his statements, given that on the one hand “you said that, ultimately [rescEU] is useless”, but that “you are calling for increased funding for the same mechanism”.

“What is your idea?” he asked.

Geadi’s response was that in light of the fact that he had gone to the scene of the fire in Limassol in July, “I saw the shortcomings, I saw there are huge gaps”.

“That is why I emphasised the need to strengthen this mechanism, so that Europe can finally become safe,” he said.

Independent Fidias Panayiotou was also scathing of the EU’s response to the fire, saying that “the European Union did almost nothing to help us”.

He said Cyprus is “too far away from continental Europe” and that as such, “all the help sent from the EU doesn’t reach us on time”.

“With this wildfire, we actually received more help from third countries like Jordan, Egypt, Israel and Lebanon than from the EU countries. This is not a good look for the European Union, and us Cypriots feel abandoned by the EU,” he said.

He said that while Cypriots are “grateful for all the help” sent by the EU, “sadly, it is not enough”.

“You were not in Cyprus when we needed you the most, and this needs to change,” he said.

The final Cypriot to address the Strasbourg parliament was Disy’s Michalis Hadjipantela, who said Cyprus “is once again paying a heavy price for climate change”.

“The European Union cannot consider that it has done its duty with a few words of sympathy. We do not need sympathy, we need actions. We have an obligation to invest in prevention and preparedness by strengthening the rescEU mechanism,” he said.

He had earlier in the summer called for the EU to station two firefighting aircraft in Cyprus.