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

The world is rightly disgusted at Putin’s bloody invasion of Ukraine and it is right and proper that we should be as generous as possible in our solidarity with the Ukrainian people fleeing Putin's bloody war. I want to commend groups like the Red Cross and the many individuals who have offered accommodation, many of whom have gone out to offer transport and other assistance in the Ukraine to help Ukrainian people exit this disastrous war instigated by Putin.

We have a huge task in terms of accommodating the people who are coming in but, frankly, this should be the moment when we take the sort of radical measures we should have taken long ago to address the housing emergency in this country. One of the things we learned during Covid, and we may learn it again, is that when the Government actually wants to have an emergency response, it is capable of doing so. It is absolutely right that we should have an emergency response to the disaster in Ukraine. However, in the St. Helen's Court complex, where people have been threatened with eviction by a vulture fund and where, sitting alongside the place people are being evicted from, there have been for the past two years 15 empty apartments that the vulture fund has just sat on, which should have been used to house people, someone said to me: “Maybe, finally, the Government will build some houses for us.” In other words, they were not in any way hostile to Ukrainians coming in and they absolutely recognise the need to be generous, but they simultaneously ask if this means we actually could have the wherewithal to make homelessness a thing of the past and take the sort of radical measures to get hold of empty properties being sat on by speculators, land hoarders and so on to house everybody. We should have done it long before now and this should be the moment when we do it.

The other thing I want to comment on is this. If we are rightly opening the door and our hearts to people fleeing from Ukraine, it has also essentially revealed a double standard in terms of providing refuge to people fleeing war. We learn, with Ukraine, why people flee their homes. It is because of war and, immediately, we recognise they do not want to leave home but they need assistance. Was that any less true in Afghanistan, except it was a US-led war? Maybe that is why we had a different attitude. Was that any less true in Syria, which was a Russian-led war? We were different in terms of our treatment of Syrians. Do we show the same generosity for people fleeing Somalia, which the US bombed in the past few weeks? There is a different standard. Those double standards will come back to haunt us. Those double standards are apparent in our different responses to the politics of Putin’s imperialist invasion. It is an imperialist invasion but so was the US-UK-led war on Iraq. What is the support for Israel, which Amnesty is now rightly condemning as guilty of crimes against humanity against the Palestinian people? We do not impose the same sanctions on them, we do not criticise them in the same way and we certainly do not offer the same level of solidarity to the Palestinian people. Is this going to be the moment when double standards are abandoned and we oppose all warmongering in the same way and show solidarity to all people fleeing war, regardless of their colour or creed?

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