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

The attack by ISIL in Paris was a vile and barbaric atrocity which must be condemned unreservedly. We must do everything to defeat the poisonous, inhuman ideology that drove such an attack. That should be clear to all of us but for precisely that reason I would appeal to the Government to raise its voice against the moves and actions now being taken by the French Government, the United States Government and the Russians in response to this atrocity and the situation in Syria. They are compounding it further by bombing people in cities like Raqqa and elsewhere in Syria. To do that is to pour petrol on an already disastrous fire and to ensure that the fire spreads. For them to bomb as a response to this attack will not prevent atrocities like the ones we saw on Friday but it will ensure that we have more of them, and we must avoid that. If our concern and shock means anything, we must act to prevent such atrocities happening again.

We must recognise that US, Russian and American bombing, for example, has claimed 457 innocent Syrian lives over the past year. Every one of those deaths, 100 of which were children, is just as tragic, barbaric and inhumane, and must be condemned just as equally. Killing more innocent people as a response to the Paris attacks will be a disaster. That was the point the anti-war movement made after the atrocities on 11 September 2001 in New York. Millions of people went on the streets and begged countries like the United States and Britain not to compound that tragedy by bombing countries like Afghanistan and Iraq because it would make the situation worse, spread the instability and guarantee that more people would be pushed into the hands of vile Jihadist extremist, which is exactly what happened.

If we are to deal with this problem we should not pour petrol on the fire that makes it worse. We must deal with the inconsistencies and hypocrisy of western and big power policy in supporting brutal, despotic regimes in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq and Egypt and stop giving finance, arms and political support to those regimes that create the conditions that give rise to extremist groups like ISIL and the chaos we are seeing in Syria.

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