Clare Daly (Dublin North, Socialist Party)

The Minister of State, Deputy Creighton, will live to regret the points she made about this intervention being a success. We can return to that at a different date.

With the mounting civilian death toll, the genuine hopes of ordinary people in Benghazi and Tobruk that the no-fly zone and military intervention would assist them in defending the revolution and protect their interests are fast disappearing. The tensions between the attacking powers reflect a jockeying for position and show the naked political and economic calculations at the heart of the intervention, which was nothing more than an attempt to seize the opportunity to place a more compliant regime in that oil wealthy region.

It is also being used to establish the democratic credentials of some of the European powers. Are we expected to believe the attacking powers have had a Damascene conversion and are now friends of the Libyan people? They were never their friends before; they were not friends last month, when the The Wall Street Journal was lamenting the fact that the partnership between Colonel Gadaffi's intelligence service and the CIA was about to be broken. They were not friends of the Libyan people when they were trading in arms and when they turned a blind eye to the actions of the regime. The double standards in the approach here compared with the approach to other countries have been well highlighted. This is about oil and the installation of a more pliable regime.

The Minister of State's points trying to justify the intervention under the fig leaf of the support of the Arab League need further examination. The composition of that body reflects a collection of reactionary autocrats who rule in their own countries through repression and lack of democracy; it is not a crowd we would want to align ourselves with.

The ordinary people in Ireland stand squarely behind the population of Libya in its struggle for democratic rights and an end to the stranglehold and corruption of the Gadaffi regime and the clique surrounding it, and in the struggle to ensure oil and other resources in the country are used for the benefit of the population. That issue, however, will be decided by the Libyan people. The intervention by attacking forces has not assisted that struggle; it has made it worse, even from the simple point that it has allowed Gadaffi to use anti-imperialist rhetoric to rally his own supporters around the western parts of Libya and in Tripoli.

I agree with the points made by Ministers that this is a complex and dangerous situation. There is widespread opposition to Colonel Gadaffi, particularly in the east of Libya, but it is not that straightforward. People are also concerned about what he might be replaced by and about the west's involvement in this. They need only look to Iraq or Afghanistan to see the dangers in the situation. I do not agree with the Minister of State that the intervention was necessary to protect the population of Benghazi. There are 1 million people living in and around that city and it would have been possible for the Libyan people themselves to defend the city and to appeal to the army rank and file to support a common programme for democratic rights and a secure economic future.

The self-appointed interim body, the Transitional National Council, does not point the way forward. These people appointed themselves and many of them are defectors from the Gadaffi regime, while others are very pro-western. They are not members of the independent organisations that represent Libyan workers and young people. The way out of the situation is, as Deputy Wallace said, through a mass movement of an organised character similar to those in Tunisia and Egypt, without intervention from foreign powers, based around a programme for democratic rights, the reversal of privatisations and the use of the oil and other wealth for the benefit of the population. We have a role to play in supporting a movement that can cut across the tribal and regional divisions that exist in the country around a programme to transform the lives of people living in Libya and to get rid of Gadaffi.

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