Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Thirty years ago I flew into Tripoli Airport on a Libyan Arab Airlines flight. Yesterday the one functioning airport in Tripoli was bombed. Twenty-eight people are dead. In 2011 we had only just been elected to this House when the then Minister of State Lucinda Creighton bragged about the success of the mission in Libya. It gives me no comfort whatsoever to say we warned that she would live to regret those words. There is a sad irony in the words of the then Labour Party leader and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Eamon Gilmore, during the same debate:

These developments and the uprisings which have followed in other countries throughout the region such as Yemen [dear God], Bahrain and now Libya are historic in nature. They rightly bear comparison in many respects to the collapse of the former communist regimes in eastern Europe in the late 1980s.

That naivety would be touching if the consequences were not so serious. The Tánaiste knows that what happened in Libya was certainly historic. However, the then Government was certainly on the wrong side of history because it was always about regime change and only the very credulous would have thought it had anything to do with humanitarian reasons. During the intervention NATO supported an array of rebel groups fighting on the ground which were dominated by Islamic extremists. It pummelled Libya with air strikes and the outcome was grimly predictable. We see the consequences in the escalation of violence over the weekend and in recent days in which thousands of people have died. Millions of Libyans have been displaced and nearly one third of the population have fled to Tunisia. In the midst of all of this - we might deal with it in the questions to be asked - the European Union has decided to trap desperate refugees in Europe. Will the Government bring up this issue with the European Council or will Europe's leaders pretend that the destabilisation of Libya and its transformation into what is in reality a nightmarish "Mad Max" replica has nothing to do with them or the decisions they made at the time? When will our neutral Government try to shake the European Union out of its complacency in that regard? I ask the Tánaiste to deal with that issue and the issue of the thousands of desperate refugees and migrants who are trying to get into Europe and essentially being forced back into the hands of the Libyan coast guard, open slave markets and so on.

While he is doing so, the Tánaiste might deal with the issue we raised in the previous pre-European Council meeting statements of moving from one regime change to another and indicate the reason he decided to take a call from Juan Guaidó, a person who had no authority under international or Venezuelan law to be declared as President of Venezuela, whether he regrets that stance and if he will outline his latest protestations against the continued economic, not humanitarian, crisis in Venezuela.

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