Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The response to our motion is not acceptable in many ways. The motion we put before the House is not about the Syrian war or about blame. It is simply a humanitarian proposition dealing with the situation facing ordinary Syrian people at the moment. The response of the Government, Fianna Fáil and, indeed, some of the left parties to this shows the games that are being played around this issue, with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael bending the knee to the US and EU establishments and those on the left thinking that a bomb or a bullet from Bashar al-Assad is somehow worse than one coming from ISIS. The only amendment we will be accepting is that from Sinn Féin, which encapsulates all of our issues, although, to be honest, we did not think it was necessary given our motion stood on its own.

This issue shows us the difficulty of interference from outside. This is about the people of Syria. They do not want our opinions; they want our help. I am conscious, when we talk about the impact of sanctions on the Syrian people, that at present there are 36 countries against whom the EU has sanctions in place. While we would certainly have a problem with many of those sanctions, there is a world of difference between sanctions imposed on a country outside a war and on a country in a war. We note, in particular, the devastation being meted out to people in Yemen at the moment and I think it is important not to diminish that situation. However, we want to state at the outset that to speak out against an injustice in one area does not make us silent with regard to other parts of the globe.

The reason we have tabled this motion and singled out Syria is because we had the honour and privilege to go there and experience it at first hand and to meet many people in that country over recent weeks. Of course, Syria is experiencing the biggest humanitarian emergency since the Second World War, with more than 400,000 people dead, the displacement of half of its population, 6 million people internally displaced and 5 million people driven outside of its borders, a country that has gone from self-sufficiency to dependency on aid in six years. This was a country that gave us the oldest inhabited city of Damascus, with seven UNESCO sites, and a country which made 14% of its GDP from tourism, employing hundreds of thousands of people. It is against this backdrop that we look at the impact of continued EU sanctions.

We went to a refugee camp outside Damascus at Sayyidah Zainab, where we had a meeting with the survivors of the Shia towns of al-Fu’ah and Kafriya. We met a doctor who made the point that Syria would be rebuilt. He said:

Hospitals have 100 times more people than they have resources. Here, in the cradle of civilisation, we are humans and love other humans. We hope this does not happen in your country.

We asked him what we could do, and he said: "Just see, and say what you see." That is what we are trying to do with this motion today. We think too many people are afraid of being cast on either side of the war but we want to report what we saw and to talk about that.

The theory is that sanctions are supposed to weaken the regime and put on pressure to undermine it. That is absolute rubbish. It was not the case in 1979 when sanctions were imposed and it certainly was not the case when they were massively escalated in 2011. The regime is not going to fall and the only thing being undermined by sanctions is the living standards of the population, who have already suffered severe hardship. Of course, we also know that sanctions are put forward with the idea that something is being done but we know since Iraq that sanctions have a terrible effect on people. Some 500,000 children died from the sanctions in Iraq. In fact, it was a crime against humanity. Denis Halliday, the head of the UN humanitarian programme in Iraq in 1997 and 1998, when he was resigning, made the following point:

I had been instructed to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a million individuals ... We all know that the regime, Saddam Hussein, is not paying the price for economic sanctions; on the contrary, he has been strengthened by them. It is the little people who are losing their children or their parents for lack of untreated water.

It is exactly the same today as it was then. That is the situation we are also dealing with in Syria. Sanctions are a blunt instrument, with negative consequences for a sovereign state and often with unforeseen consequences for civilians. They seldom impact on the government and they are certainly not having an impact on the government of Bashar al-Assad. This policy, ironically, is actually serving to strengthen him. Deputy Wallace will make further points in this regard and I will also make further points when I sum up.

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