Thomas Pringle (Donegal South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I begin by extending my personal sympathy to the people of Paris and France in the wake of the atrocities carried out in the city last Friday evening. It was an attempt to terrorise a whole community, city and country. That is probably the only thing most of us can understand of the aims of those who carried out the attack. However, it is important to put the Paris attack in context by bearing in mind that several such attacks have taken place in recent weeks. Last week a bomb attack in Beirut caused the deaths of more than 40 people. Was that attack any less horrific or terrorising than what happened in Paris? It was not. The bombing of a Russian aircraft over Egypt some weeks ago was another act of terror and equally as horrific. We should always ask ourselves whether attacks are any less terrorising or awful simply because they take place closer to the war zone in Syria. The people who die in such incidents are just as innocent as the unfortunate people who died in France on Friday night and their families, too, will suffer for years to come.

This is the time to examine why such atrocities take place. Over the weekend we saw how Deputy Mick Wallace was attacked for the tweet he had sent in which he expressed his sympathy for the victims of the attack in Paris while also pointing to the things we in the West had done and were doing that led to actions such as these. We cannot remove ourselves from the obligation to consider that point. It is dangerous to consider only the security response and decide the only response is to bomb Syria into the ground. Is that the right response? We must examine the policies that countries of the West, including some in the European Union, have carried out which have laid waste to Afghanistan and Iraq and perhaps planted the seeds that allowed Islamic State to build the position it has gained in Syria. We must consider what we can do, what changes we can make, to prevent attacks from happening in the future. That is a more long-term and probably more difficult approach than what we are seeing. It is very easy to have a knee-jerk reaction which involves declaring war and bombing and killing more innocent people in an act of revenge.

We have to look at how we can change the way we behave in the world to ensure these attacks do not happen again.

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