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

Sometimes it is sad when one's predictions are dramatically confirmed. The prediction made by those of us who opposed the Lisbon and Nice treaties and the Iraq war that Europe was moving towards becoming a corporate, militarised, imperial power - to use what some might consider the archaic language of the left - is dramatically confirmed by this European Council meeting. There is a huge irony with regard to arguments that were used by Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and the Labour Party during debates on the Lisbon treaty. They argued that we must support Europe because the European project will prevent a repeat of the horrors of the First and Second World Wars. They said the European Union was a project of European co-operation, bringing peace to Europe and ensuring those horrors could never happen again. Yes, I understand - the way to prevent the horrors that we saw in the First World War, when big powers sent millions of people out to slaughter one another so that those powers could control resources and colonies, repeated again in the Second World War, is to develop a European arms industry, to produce drones and weapons of mass destruction and to gear the European Union up for military actions outside its territory. That is Orwellian doublethink if ever I saw it. One reads in the communique that the Council "laments" the fact defence budgets in Europe are "constrained". There are many things to lament in Europe and there are a hell of a lot of things that are constrained, including budgets for health, education and economic stimulation to provide employment for our young people. Something that is not lamentable, however, is constrained defence budgets, particularly if the European Union is supposed to be about promoting peace and international solidarity. We should be delighted and should be seeking to reduce the defence budgets further and to redeploy those resources into areas that actually improve the lives of ordinary citizens. We should not be developing ever more sophisticated ways of killing people, but that is what the European arms industry is about.

The latest fad among big Western powers and the European Union, in terms of sophisticated weapons to kill people, is the drone. Tragically, the Irish Government has embraced the new European enthusiasm for drones. These disgusting weapons are manless machines which wreak death and destruction at the push of a button by people on the other side of the world on innocent people in some of the poorest countries in the world, including Pakistan and Afghanistan. One would not see it in a bad James Bond movie in which characters are dreamed up who are bent on world domination and who inflict untold horrors on ordinary people. That is what these drones do and the Irish Government is now buying drones from Israel. I would like the Minister of State to outline the extent to which Israel is involved in this new European drive towards greater militarisation and more co-operation with NATO. It is unbelievable that we are buying drones from Israel, a country involved in systematic and ongoing violation of human rights, which has been condemned by just about every humanitarian organisation in the world for its use of vile weapons, including chemical weapons, against the Palestinian population. The Irish Government is buying drones from Israel and the European Union is integrating Israel's military-industrial complex into the new European military-industrial complex to provide the base for creating a European army - to fight whom?

Margaretta D'Arcy is an artist, a writer, a member of Aosdána, a pensioner, a Parkinson's disease sufferer and a peace activist. She has been protesting against the use of Shannon Airport to facilitate the illegal rendition programme of kidnapping and torture being conducted by the CIA. She has opposed the use of the airport as a stop-off point for American planes on their way to bomb people in Afghanistan and, previously, in Iraq. She is now languishing in jail, and meanwhile the Taoiseach swans off to the European Council and supports the militarisation of Europe.

Last week he was in the United Arab Emirates, hobnobbing with the brutal dictators of the gulf states, cementing trade deals with people who did not allow democracy, who cut off the heads of their political opponents and denied every basic human and civil right. They are vile regimes. We have also cemented new trade deals with the Chinese dictatorship. That is what we now do - we consort with and celebrate our new arrangements with dictators - and we are supposed to applaud this, while a peace activist, writer and an artist languishes in jail because out of good conscience she said a neutral country should not participate in or in any way facilitate a military machine or a programme of kidnapping and torture, something that has been well documented by international human rights organisations, while we say nothing.

Is that the type of society we promote? We do not even raise issues, as commented on by some members of the media when the Taoiseach was in the United Arab Emirates. They asked why he had not raised the issue of human rights. He was told it was not the time or place to do this; it was just business. If business means ignoring human rights, dictatorships and regimes that use violence, we will not say a word and, in fact, will emulate them. We will do the same in Europe, as Romano Prodi put it a number of years ago in a rare moment of honesty - to fight the resource wars of the 21st century, just like we had resource wars at the beginning of the 20th century and again between 1939 and 1945. It is absolutely despicable. The ordinary citizens of Europe pay the price, with 20 million unemployed, public services being decimated by cuts and austerity, while the corporate, military, industrial complex is protected by the powers that be, aided and abetted by the Fine Gael and Labour Party Government.

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