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

I lived in Granada in Spain for a year. I have great love for Spanish culture and the Spanish people. However, I can do nothing but condemn in the strongest possible terms the outrageous repression, violence and brutality being meted out by the Spanish state against an entirely peaceful movement. I find it quite extraordinary that our Government along with the main Opposition party - Fianna Fáil, the Republican Party - are giving cover to the Spanish state and are providing excuses for it by talking about the need to operate through that state's constitutional order and its government's policies, which are specifically designed to crush a peaceful movement by force if necessary through the use of violence and repression. That is the point. All this abstract "on the one hand and on the other hand" stuff masks the silence and failure of the political establishment in Ireland and Europe to call a spade a spade.

What has the Spanish state done in response to successive peaceful efforts on the part of the Catalonian people over many years to change the situation? It was not even initially about independence but was rather an effort to increase autonomy and to have a dialogue and votes to allow for self-determination. At every hand's turn, the Spanish state has sought to scupper that and to cut off any kind of peaceful approach to reform, enhanced autonomy or giving the people of Catalonia the right to democratic self-determination. Mr. Rajoy, in particular, has made his political career on trying to deny, crush, scupper and frustrate the peaceful efforts of the Catalonian people to exercise self-determination. Our Government just will not call it for what it is: sending in 6,000 paramilitary police; going without court orders to the headquarters of political parties in government and organising raids on them; arresting parliamentarians; arresting civil servants; raiding newspapers and printworks that produce newspapers; trying to scupper free debate; seizing 10 million ballot papers; seizing leaflets being produced that were pro-referendum or pro-independence; and using physical force and violence to prevent people from getting to ballot boxes. In the last couple of days there have been threats to use force to impose direct rule and disband a democratically elected government. Our Government sits by and does not condemn this.

Self-determination is an elementary principle. I think it is the first article of the UN charter. It is about freely determining, without external interference, the political status and to pursue the economic, social and cultural development of a people. By any definition, the people of Catalonia at least have a case as to having a cultural history, a national history and the right to express their view on the matter. However, the Spanish state and its constitution are saying, "Never. That is not on the agenda." In the same way, Britain for a very long time would have said to Ireland, "Sorry lads, there is no peaceful way to achieve this. We are not allowing it because it is our union and we will decide." This is a Spanish state that has a history of fascism and authoritarianism. We are seeing some of that authoritarian tendency articulated against a completely peaceful movement. What is surprising, in fact, is how peaceful the Catalonian movement still manages to be given the level of provocation, repression and violence and the denial of any sort of democratic avenue to the people.

The Irish Government and the Opposition should be condemning what the Spanish state is doing instead of giving cover for it. We should give a little bit of support to a peaceful movement regardless of our views on independence. We should just uphold basic principles of civil liberties, self-determination, democracy and the right of civil society actors to campaign for independence without being imprisoned for sedition. Could the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade not do that?

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