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

I am sharing time with Deputy Barry.

Black lives matter. Racism is not so much a virus as a poison deliberately administered. George Floyd was a victim of murderous, brutal and systemic racism that was deliberately stoked, encouraged and escalated by the billionaire Donald Trump, who uses racism deliberately, as even General James "Mad Dog" Mattis has admitted, to divide and rule, to deflect away from economic and social injustice and to set people against one another. Will the Taoiseach condemn Donald Trump for his use of racism and police brutality as a result of which George Floyd lost his life and of which millions of Americans and millions more across the world are victims?

Will he match his words against racism by eliminating the racist injustice that is the direct provision system? It is an inhumane and degrading system that marks people of colour out as different, other and separate and, consequently, leads to encouraging that poison and racism. Will he accept that the failure to address systemic and ongoing inequality, poverty and injustice perpetuates the soil in which racism and the divide and rule tactics we have seen from Donald Trump continue to flourish? If he does not, his condemnation means nothing. In order to eliminate racism we need to eschew divide and rule tactics and address the horrors of poverty, unemployment and homelessness. If the Taoiseach condemns racism, does he also recognise his Government's failure to deal with those ingredients that continue to perpetuate the opportunity for that divide and rule poison to be used by cynical and dishonest leaders?

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