Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

George Orwell, in his fantastic work 1984, described a dystopian future where the world is divided into three big geopolitical military blocs in a state of permanent warfare, but that reality was glossed over by ideological doublespeak from the rulers of those blocs whose motto was "war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength". That is precisely what we are getting from the Government and Fianna Fáil when it comes to our involvement with the increasing process of militarisation and the creation of a European army.

Incredibly, they acclaim it. It is encapsulated in the name - PfP with NATO. This is an oxymoron, it is doublespeak, and it is a contradiction in terms. NATO is a nuclear, military, expansionist, aggressive alliance. It has a first-strike nuclear policy, which means you fire nuclear weapons at other people before they fire them at you. The EU is integrating with the organisation and the Government is dragging us by stealth into that through the process of PfP and these sorts of agreements while claiming it is not affecting our neutrality. It is rubbish.

Let us look at the current deployment in Mali. Mali is a place where the French have a colonial history, and not a very good one. We are deploying 12 Army rangers, just enough so we do not have to invoke the triple lock, but we are not involved in peacekeeping, where peace has been established, but instead we are in-between, maintaining the peace but basically in a civil war situation where the Government we are supporting has itself acknowledged it is killing innocent civilians in a complicated conflict. Why the hell are we sending our troops into that dangerous situation and aligning ourselves with aggressive imperial powers like France? In this case, we are aligning with NATO, which is instigating an expansionist policy in eastern Europe and intensifying conflict with Russia, one of the other aggressive geopolitical military blocs. It is madness and we absolutely oppose it.

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