Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Chairman. Like everyone else in this room the horror of what happened in Tunisia brings home to us in a very graphic way the horror that is happening every day in that part of the world. Some lessons have to be learned from the triumphalism of the West, which thought it could rush in with a ballot paper and a 300-year history of democracy, with all its faults, and impose it on regimes that were carved artificially out of the sands by the Versailles treaty irrespective of the nations affected, the religious groups and the composition and location of Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims.

It is a very complex and very difficult situation for the West and Ireland is very much part of the West, irrespective of what individual political opinions might be on the point. The adventure of Tony Blair and George Bush into Iraq has destabilised that country and this has led to a contagion which is very consciously targeting pro-Western, modern countries like Tunisia. There has been a systematic attack, first on the Bardo museum and subsequently on Tunisia's tourist industry which employs an enormous number of Tunisian people. If one destroys the economies of those fragile, semi-developed countries, one inevitably precipitates an exodus of refugees desperately trying to get to the northern shores of the Mediterranean.

This was not an isolated incident from a madman who ran amok. It was planned and he was part of the cell that previously protected the attackers in the Bardo museum. There was a wonderful legacy of Roman and pre-Roman remains along the southern coast of the Mediterranean, and Tunisia has a lot of them. The tourist industry related both to that and the Mediterranean. They attacked a large hotel and a museum of what is part of Europe's old civilisation, targeted deliberately to drive these people into a place of chaos and fear which is landing daily on the shores of southern Europe. The overall view, which I have just presented in a succinct way and which other members may add to, has been brought home very specifically to us, both in County Meath and in Athlone.

Naturally, our sympathies go out to those Irish families who have been bereaved, but they have been attacked as people who represent a civilisation and culture that is now the target of an irrational Islamic extremism that has got nothing to do with the tenets of the second largest, soon to be the largest, religion in the world that stretches from Morocco right across to the far side of Indonesia and embraces all aspects of that religious culture and tradition. We must make very clear that we do not associate mainstream Islam and Muslims, many of whom live in this country, with that outrageous attack, no more than we associated the murders of the IRA in Northern Ireland of people whose sole sin was that they happened to be Protestant workers, as being representative of the people of Ireland.