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

They want an army. The Minister of State can tell us it does not have implications but if the people who are driving this believe it is moving towards an army then that is what it is moving towards. Even the term "battle groups" implies battles yet we speak about peace making and all the rest of it. President Macron speaks of getting feet on the ground in Libya, where military action by the French and others has been a total disaster.

The Minister of State spoke of some PESCO commitments such as maritime surveillance, as though they were benign commitments, and that there would be the triple lock and so on. Currently, maritime surveillance means a wall such as Donald Trump has not even managed to construct. Donald Trump promised he was going to construct a horrendous, racist wall to keep Mexicans out of the United States when in fact it is the European Union that has built a wall. This wall has resulted in 35,000 to 40,000 migrants drowning in the Mediterranean Sea because the EU does not want to let them in. The EU then wants to boost surveillance budgets to prevent the migrants getting in. This is what the EU is doing. It has built the wall that Trump wants to build, and the EU is repelling these desperate people who are fleeing. They are drowning in the Mediterranean Sea. Many of them are fleeing precisely the situations such as those created in Libya by the French. Why the hell would Ireland participate in this?