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

The British based writer and journalist, Richard Seymour, recently wrote an article about the refugee crisis entitled "When is a Tragedy a Massacre". In that article, with which I agree, he lays the blame for the massacre of human beings trying to get into the Europe at the door of the European Union. That this is a massacre, let there be no doubt. Since 2000, 22,000 human beings - I agree with Deputy Eoghan Murphy that the people about whom we are speaking should not be called migrants or refugees - huge numbers of them children have died while trying to get into Europe, some of them having drowned in the most awful of circumstances. Children trying to get into Europe have been washed up on beaches.

Since 2013, approximately 8,000 people have died while trying to get into Europe. I keep repeating the phrase "trying to get into Europe" because we need to dwell on the significance of it. The reason people are dying is because they are trying to get into Europe and the European Union does not want to let them in. It is as simple as that. There would not be smugglers were it not for the fact that the European Union does not want to let people in. The European Union would rather risk children dying and families drowning than let them into Europe. Maintaining border control is more important to the European Union than is ensuring that not one more child or family dies. That is the simple, cold, brutal fact.

I welcome that in this Parliament - possibly the only one in the whole of Europe - we do not have any filthy, nasty racists trying to exploit people's fears in regard to refugees but we need to go further if we are not to be seen to be simply cleansing our consciences. We must raise our voices and highlight that the policies of the European Union, of which Ireland is a member, are resulting in the needless death of thousands of human beings, many of them children. We must highlight that at every level the European Union and the so-called civilised western world has the blood of these people on its hands, not only in terms of their refusing to allow these people into Europe or trying to keep them out of Europe but in terms of their having contributed directly to the conditions which drove them from their homes in the first instance.

We all know the countries from which the largest numbers of human beings are fleeing to Europe, namely, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. The European Union and the United States are responsible for the humanitarian crisis that is unfolding before our eyes. As a member of the European Union, Ireland is responsible, directly or indirectly, for this crisis. We have facilitated the US war machine in its continuing war in Afghanistan. We have put troops into Afghanistan, working with the NATO forces who have effectively destroyed Afghanistan. As an anti-war activist and somebody who has been campaigning against the Afghanistan war since it commenced in 2002 it came as a surprise to me to learn that the number of civilian deaths in Afghanistan was at its highest level last year and continues to increase. The situation there is worsening. The number of deaths attributable to the pro-Government forces, including NATO, increased by 42% last year. NATO and the political forces we are supporting, as well as the Taliban and ISIS which are reactionary, horrible political forces, are responsible for an increasing number of needless, brutal, innocent deaths yet we say nothing about that. We do nothing about the fact that the troops that are responsible for this, that caused the war in Afghanistan and caused the situation there to worsen through the killing of innocent civilians, are passing through Shannon Airport every day. We also permitted that in relation to the Iraqi war.

Anybody who is being honest knows that there is a direct line between the US war in Iraq and the crisis in Syria. It was obvious that when the infrastructure of Iraq was decimated in that war there would be a knock-on effect for Syria. It was predicted by everybody who opposed that war that it would destabilise Syria and so it did. ISIS would not exist but for the war in Iraq and we were complicit in that. It goes on and we continue to back a Government in Iraq that is ruthlessly sectarian and has deepened the divisions between Sunni and Shia who used to live happily side by side in the same towns and villages.

As a direct result of the war and the political forces that the West backed in Iraq, we have turned it into a sectarian nightmare that has fuelled the growth of ISIS. That went on to spill over into Syria, another regime who were ruthlessly crushing the Syrian population which the governments of the likes of Germany, France and Russia sold arms and did business with. We are responsible on every level.

Others have mentioned Palestine. The ruthless oppression of Palestinian human rights, the brutal treatment of them, the successive assaults on Gaza, the rounding up of people without trial, the destruction of people's homes, the occupation and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian land; it just goes on. Yet we still treat Israel as if it is a normal state. We conduct normal diplomatic relations with these people. Would we let a known ISIS fighter into this country and welcome them? Of course we would not. Would we have normal diplomatic relations with ISIS? Of course we would not. We would be right not to. Why is it okay to have normal diplomatic relations with the Saudi regime, the Israeli regime and some of those other rotten regimes in the Gulf?

Let me also mention the Egyptian regime. I do not have the time to read the report, but I want to mention the name of a socialist who has just been arrested in Egypt. He is a human rights lawyer caught up in the round-up of thousands of innocent people who were involved in the protests against the latest turn in Egyptian policy by the el-Sisi regime in which they are planning to sell off a series of Egyptian islands to the Saudi dictatorship. There are peaceful, civil protests going on and thousands of people are being rounded up, including a young lawyer named Haitham Mohamedain. I want to make a particular plea for our Government to speak out on his behalf. He has been arrested because he supposedly joined the Muslim Brotherhood. This man is a socialist and has nothing to do with religion. He is a civil rights lawyer but he was one of the organisers of peaceful protests that were taking place on the streets of Egypt in the last while. Along with hundreds of others who have been arrested in their beds, he has been locked up in prison and accused of trumped up charges.

Let us not forget the young Irishman Ibrahim Halawa who is also being treated like this. Why do we conduct normal relations with Egypt? Why are we selling them beef when this is what they are doing to their own people? Where is it going to lead? How long is it going to be before Egypt becomes a disaster and we have thousands of Egyptians fleeing Egypt across the Mediterranean and drowning in the Mediterranean Sea? To that we would say, "No, we are not letting you in. We cannot manage it. But we were quite happy to do business with the dictators that created the conditions which led you to flee in the first place". This hypocrisy has to stop.

So many people who support the EU project do so because they believe that Europe is some sort of progressive place. They believe that it is about trying to end conflict and to not repeat the horrors of the 1930s, 1940s, Nazism and so on. Then we look at the reality and it is quite different. Fortress Europe is brutal and inhumanitarian and its policies are leading directly to wars and to the deaths of innocent people fleeing those desperate situations.

See this speech in context