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

I was just reading over the debate in January 2003 in the Oireachtas in advance of the Gulf War when then Minister for Foreign Affairs, Brian Cowen, got up and defended what we now know to be an absolute pack of lies told by the US Government, US military intelligence, the British Government and British military intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that did not exist. Brian Cowen and others said there was a real danger they existed and something had to be done and the consequences of this were absolutely devastating for Iraq. Weapons of mass destruction that did not exist except in dodgy dossiers and lies told, primarily by the United States and Britain, led to the massacre of hundreds of thousands of people and the devastation of Iraq. Here we have the Government today doing exactly the same in a completely one-sided assessment of military intelligence provided, primarily by the United States and Britain, about the threat of imminent war from Russia. There is no critical assessment.

As I have said to the Minister, Deputy Coveney, I think Putin is a thug. He is a militarist. He has done horrific things in Chechnya. The Minister is happy to talk about his threat, but not about the record of the United States, Britain and NATO and what their agenda is. There is not a word of criticism.

That is why I do not trust this report. I do not trust the agenda behind it. I do not trust Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael with our military neutrality because they have trashed it. They have allowed us to be complicit in the slaughter of innocent people in Iraq with devastating consequences for the Middle East. I do not trust this.

It is fairly ironic that we are talking about fighter jets, the need to defend ourselves and €500 million extra - or is it €2 billion - which is what NATO wants and which is what the militarists in the European Union want us to do. They want to go along with that but when it comes to paying the soldiers who might be sent out to die in these situations, the vast majority of them are on less than the average industrial wage. Moreover, the EU working time directive does not apply to them so that they have to work overtime for free, they do not get the housing they used to get any more and they are affected by the housing crisis and so on. Why does the Government not pay the soldiers? If it has so much respect for the Defence Forces, it should pay the soldiers decent money. It is a joke. They will have all these new ships and planes and the Government cannot even have the number of Defence Forces personnel that we need because the pay and conditions are so rubbish. The Government should pay the Defence Forces properly and let them be affiliated to the Irish Congress of Trade Unions but it should stop trashing Irish military neutrality and actually restore it, and stop signing up with warmongers. Whether it is NATO, the US or, for that matter, Russia, neutrality means neutrality.

See this speech in context