Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

When the Minister of State, Deputy Dara Murphy, and his colleagues are in Europe, they might remind the various European leaders that things are getting worse rather than better. I have seldom seen as little opposition in Europe to the militarisation of the Middle East and beyond. All of them seem almost to have bought into the philosophy that this is the way things are done now. France and Britain were initially pretty reluctant to take in refugees. Obviously, they and many others, including ourselves, have been shamed into it by Germany at this stage. They actually want to bomb Syria now, as if that is going to improve things. It is bad enough that the Russians have started. The whole thing is getting worse. They are all engaged in mindless nonsense. The devastation is incredible. George Monbiot described it accurately in The Guardiantoday:

There are no simple solutions to the chaos and complexities western firepower has helped to unleash, though a good start would be to stop making them worse. But a vast intelligence and military establishment that no president since Jimmy Carter has sought to control, the tremendous profits to be made by weapons companies and military contractors, portrayals of these conflicts in the media that serve only to confuse and bamboozle: they all help to ensure that armed escalation, however pointless and counter-productive, appears unstoppable.

He also refers to NATO's description of the bombing of the hospital in Kunduz:

"The strike may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility." This is how an anonymous Nato spokesperson described Saturday’s disaster in Afghanistan. Let's translate it into English. "We bombed a hospital, killing 22 people." But "people", "hospital" and "bomb", let alone "we": all such words are banned from Nato's lexicon.

The plane came back repeatedly to bomb the people trying to escape from the building. We are sitting at the table with these people. We have troops from our Defence Forces over there. Seven Irish defence personnel are working with these fellows in Afghanistan. What is wrong with us? This is a war crime. We have been told that the Americans are going to do an internal investigation. I suggest that is like getting the fox to investigate a raid on the chicken house. Can the Minister of State and his colleagues start calling the truth the truth and challenging war crime when they see it?

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