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

We were out criticising what the Russians were doing in Kazakhstan last week, and there is not much action from the Government on that. I stood at many a protest over what the Russians did in Chechnya and the carnage they inflicted there and I did not see Members opposite there, so they should not try to confuse the issue.

While I object absolutely to the Russians' massing troops on the Ukrainian border, to the whole nature of the Russian regime and, for that matter, to the carrying out of military exercises in the Irish maritime area, the problem is that I have heard not a word about the NATO military exercise on 24 January in the Mediterranean. There has been no criticism of that military exercise, in which NATO flexed its muscles. It was the first time since the end of the Cold War that an entire US aircraft carrier fleet came under NATO control. What is it doing there except ratcheting up the tensions? The Russians are massing troops on the Ukrainian border; they should not be doing so. The Americans are planning to send troops into Ukraine and are arming the Ukrainians, as are many of the NATO powers - not Germany, notably, but many European powers are arming the Ukrainians with weapons that the Russians, as much as I criticise them, have a reason to be concerned about. James Baker promised at the time that an eastward expansion of NATO would not happen. That promise was broken and NATO was expanded aggressively, encircling Russia, inevitably provoking an escalation of political and military tensions. There has been not a word on that from the Irish Government and no balance in its criticism. That is why I say it is not being neutral or objective in this.

Some of the world's media outlets that do not have an axe to grind for one side or the other are objective in their assessment of what is going on. Ireland is not. Why? Because the Irish political establishment has always, in truth, wanted to facilitate the US-led western bloc, as it does at Shannon Airport, allowing it to prosecute the utterly disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered and we facilitated it. We facilitated the kidnap and torture programme that is US rendition. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and some of their coalition partners stood over that and allowed that to happen and continue to allow it to happen. They want to sign us up to the permanent structured co-operation, PESCO, when the European military project being pushed is all about deepening the integration with NATO, which is a first-strike military and nuclear alliance. I ask the House to just think about that. NATO has a policy of first-strike use of nuclear weapons against states that do not have nuclear weapons. That is an actual policy of NATO. We should be railing against that kind of stuff.

Let us uphold our shattered tradition of neutrality and call this out for what it is. These are two nasty, expansionist military-political big power alliances. Neutrality means calling them both out and calling for people to step back from the brink of war, to demilitarise the area, to de-escalate and to say that weapons and the deployment of same as well as military advisors and troops from either side are not acceptable and are adding fuel to the fire.

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