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

We believe the time is right and appropriate to have a referendum to let the people of this country make a decision, which is what this Bill is doing. We want to put our traditional military neutrality, which this and successive Governments have tried to undermine, into the Constitution so it is absolutely guaranteed and secured, and to stop the very concerted push by successive Governments to align us with the NATO military alliance dominated by major imperial powers, namely, the United States, the UK, France, Germany and so on.

They are powers that have led barbaric conflicts, most obviously in Iraq in 2003, which claimed the lives of 1 million people. In Afghanistan, tens of thousands of people were killed. The leading powers of NATO continue to arm Saudi Arabia in an EU-UK supported war in Yemen that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and brought 14 million people to the brink of starvation.

These powers dominate NATO and we should have absolutely nothing to do with them, especially in the face of Putin's brutal imperialistic war. If we are rightly horrified by an imperialist war being waged by Putin, with devastating consequences for the people of Europe and Ukraine, then, surely, we must take a lesson from that.

We have to stand against all warmongering, all imperialism and all military alliances that are about controlling other people’s lands and resources, shoring up spheres of influence and spending billions on weapons to kill people. Surely this is the most important time to reassert our neutrality. That does not mean being indifferent. It means remembering where James Connolly and the people who helped found this State stood when they fought to establish this State against the brutality of the British Empire and the brutality of the First World War. We should uphold that tradition. This Bill seeks to ensure that we do that by inserting it into the Constitution.

See this speech in context