Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

Tens of thousands of mainly working-class youths on this island were slaughtered in Europe as a result of the rivalry between major imperial powers jockeying for influence, territory and markets when that rivalry exploded into the First World War. Has the Taoiseach learned nothing from the history of our own people and of small nations in Europe? The Taoiseach fully supports the policy of the EU towards Ukraine. Is it obvious to the Taoiseach that the EU was avariciously pushing its own selfish economic and political agenda in Ukraine to trump the equally avaricious Russian elite represented by Vladimir Putin and company? Of course the ordinary Ukrainian people detested the rotten Yanukovych dictatorship but is that justification for the EU to collaborate to the hilt with right-wing, semi-fascist, repulsive, xenophobic and wholly anti-progressive political forces such as Svoboda and Right Sector? The EU is conspiring with these forces to be the cat's paw of European union to advance its economic agenda within Ukraine. Does the Taoiseach support that?

Russia should be condemned for its interference in Ukraine, but does the Taoiseach not recognise the hypocrisy of his Government and the EU in pushing for sanctions when they uttered not a word against the far more bloody intervention of the EU's allies, such as the United States and Great Britain, in Iraq for example? What sanctions did any Irish Government ever support against the United States or Britain, Blair and Bush, for the bloody, criminal invasion of Iraq that has left hundreds of thousands of people dead? Is the Taoiseach satisfied the new Government in Ukraine, which he and the EU hail as a great and new democracy, has installed billionaire oligarchs as regional governors throughout Ukraine? How does it serve the interests of the ordinary Ukrainians, working-class, peasants and poor, to install oligarchs who robbed blind the resources of the country taking advantage of the collapse of the revolting Stalinist regime?

For the poor people of Ukraine, now in the tender embraces of the troika or its equivalent, what kind of future exists in terms of lifting them out of the poverty and hardship that exist for so many when an even worse neo-liberal economic regime is to be installed? Will the Taoiseach not recognise that the people of Ukraine have the right to be left alone from interfering imperial powers, whether Russia or the EU, to decide their own future without this type of meddling, behind-the-scenes string pulling, economic pressure and blackmail from both Russia and the EU? Would the Taoiseach not state those as principles in opposition to the hypocritical policy that is being followed?

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