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

There should be no ambiguity about our attitude to the Russian actions in Ukraine. They should be condemned outright. President Putin’s regime is vile. It has been involved in vicious repression of the Pussy Riot movement and gay people and carried on a terrible and brutal campaign of Russian imperialism in the smaller nations surrounding Russia which has earned it the title, Prison House of Nations, which it still deserves. That imperial impulse is driving its actions in Ukraine. Russia should get out, as President Putin has no credibility.

The hypocrisy of the European Union and the Government in the assessment of the situation in Ukraine is equally nauseating. The Taoiseach said, “Europe and the world need stability based on the fundamental principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity.” Presumably, the violation of these principles justifies sanctions. How can that be the case when, for example, Israel routinely, systematically, brutally and continually violates all of these principles and human rights, makes regular incursions into other sovereign states, affecting their territorial integrity, and Europe does not impose sanctions? Palestinians and many others have called for sanctions, but instead the European Union gives it privileged trade status, the opposite of sanctions, despite its vile breach of the principles the Taoiseach says we must uphold. That hypocrisy suggests this is not the real motive. These principles are a cover for the European Union engaging in a geopolitical battle to try to expand its borders at the expense of another geopolitical rival and being willing to play around in the most dangerous way with vile right-wing and neo-fascist forces inside Ukraine. There has been no outright condemnation of Svoboda and the Right Sector and all they stand for, in a worrying echo of what happened at the beginning of the First World War or Germany’s unilateral actions which pre-empted the war in the Balkans in the mid-1990s.

I will keep raising my next point until it is acknowledged. Is there any discussion of social objectives in Europe, or this country, particularly homelessness, poverty and unemployment, in all of the discussions about banking union and bank resolution mechanisms? Will the Government acknowledge and discuss with its European partners how property and housing are again being deployed as speculative commodities, stoking a property bubble here reminiscent of the one that led to the crash? The banks and the Government are actively encouraging this with tax breaks for speculation, banks seizing properties to maximise their value and evicting people, leading to a crisis of homelessness. What is the Government stating about the human impact or the macro-economic danger that represents?

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