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

I am sharing time with Deputy Barry.

The world is disgusted and revolted at what Vladimir Putin is doing, his bloody invasion and the imperialist logic behind it. Rightly, people's hearts go out to the people of Ukraine and they want to show all the solidarity they can. The best hope is that the resistance of the Ukrainian people, alongside the opposition of the Russian people to this bloody war, will bring it to an end and, with any luck, bring down the Putin regime. Nevertheless, I just do understand why the response to this horror of the leaders of Europe, the United States and parties in this House, largely on the Government's side, seems to be to want to use this crisis to make an argument for spending more on weapons and putting ourselves closer to the NATO military alliance. If that is the lesson one draws from this, our world is doomed. This horror flows directly from the logic of the global arms industry and all the major powers building up terrifying military and nuclear arsenals and using them again and again. Largely, the West has either ignored these horrors when they have happened elsewhere or, worse, actively colluded in them. I refer, for example, to what Saudi Arabia has been doing in Yemen for the past five years, killing 330,000 people and bringing 14 million people, as we speak, to the brink of starvation. Not only do we not sanction Saudi Arabia but we arm it, travel to the country on trade missions and say nothing about what it is doing. We support Israel and allow it to bombard Gaza again and again, to steal its people’s land and to demolish their homes, and then we expect that logic will not be pursued by other powers in the world. Of course it will be.

Furthermore, global arms expenditure has shot through the roof. While we talk about housing, health, education and our ability to deal with humanitarian catastrophe, globally we are now spending $2 trillion a year on weapons and arms, and the countries that spend it are the United States, at 39% of it, China, India, Russia, the UK, Saudi Arabia, Germany and France. They are all to blame for this madness. If you build up nuclear and military arsenals, if you fight to control spheres of influence and if you back dictators or ignore their crimes, what do you expect is going to happen? There are going to be wars, atrocities and brutal regimes such as Putin's. The last thing we need to do, faced with this horror arriving on the doorstep of Europe, is to say we need more militarism. We need to oppose militarism, full stop. We need to oppose all dictatorships and that is what Irish military neutrality is about because it came from the Irish revolution. It came from a revolution against an empire and against the First World War, to say we would not be part of this imperial madness but rather that we would stand against it and align ourselves with forces in the world that stand against war and empire. That is what we should do today.

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