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

That is even worse.

What a load of nonsense. The European Union border regime alone is like some sort of horrific nightmare from a dystopian science fiction horror movie in terms of our complicity in the horrors that are going on in Libya. We are involved in training the Libyan coast guard, which, in turn, is deeply implicated in slavery, systematic rape, beatings and torture of vulnerable people who are trapped. Up to 1 million people are trapped in Libya because the Western powers went in and destroyed Libya. Now the country has collapsed and these desperate people are looking to come to Europe for a new life. Thousands of them drown in the Mediterranean Sea with more sent back. I am absolutely amazed that the Minister of State finds this amusing, by the way. It is an horrific situation.

If there are threats out there, it is because of what Western powers, including European powers, have done in places such as Libya and the inhuman response of the European Union. Instead, we are developing systems essentially to make it easier to repel these people and co-operate with some of the forces guilty of this horror. Of course, it dates back to beyond that. There is the horrific EU-Turkey deal, again about repelling desperate Syrian migrants coming from the disaster in Syria, turning a blind eye to the horrific human rights of the Turkish regime against its own people, against journalists, locking up politicians and so on. We are quite happy to do deals with Turkey.

We are willing to engage in trade with horrific regimes such as Saudi Arabia, which is beyond words in its horror with the denial of human rights at the most basic level. After the former Taoiseach, Deputy Enda Kenny, went to the United Arab Emirates and was asked if he raised human rights issues, he said it was not really appropriate to raise human rights on trade missions. It is that kind of amorality of being willing to work with these regimes. We are doing big trade deals with the Egyptian regime. We were complicit in the US military assault on Iraq which destroyed Iraq and in turn had a knock-on effect in Syria. There would be no ISIS threat were it not for all these things.

We then justify beefing up the European military industrial complex as a response to that to protect ourselves when we have actually created that mess or been complicit in creating the mess that generated those threats in the first place. On these particular initiatives, the European arms industry has boosted its lobbying budget over the past five years from €2.6 million to €5.8 million. The 36 different meetings between the arms industry and the European Commission between 2013 and 2016 form the backdrop to this. This is the totally immoral arms industry trying to cash in on this stuff that European and other Western powers have helped generate through their direct involvement in horrors in the Middle East, Libya and Turkey or through complicity with the US war machine at Shannon here. Those are the issues we should be addressing.

Of course, we should also care about our soldiers who are standing outside the gates of Leinster House. Some of them are on family income supplement because we do not even pay them decent wages. We want to line the pockets of the European military industrial complex. We should have nothing to do with the international arms industry and the warmongering agenda that lies behind it.

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