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

Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are using a faked concern for the well-being and welfare of our soldiers and our Defence Forces in order to abandon neutrality because they want to join the big boys club of the European militarisation project and get closer to NATO. PESCO is indistinguishably and inextricably connected to NATO in their interoperability. Let us be honest: Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are embarrassed by our neutrality. They always have been and they see concern about the well-being of our troops and the Ukrainian crisis as an excuse to finally bury the tradition of neutrality. We intend to stand out strongly against that. If they are concerned about the well-being of our soldiers they should pay them properly so that they want to stay in the Defence Forces and so we can get them up to proper force. We should equip them to secure their safety but that does not mean we should get involved with the European militarisation project or with NATO.

As an aside, if we go along with the dramatic increase of expenditure that is being proposed by NATO and the European militarists we can forget about dealing with climate change.

It makes a nonsense of it because the biggest producers of CO2 emissions in the world are militaries. That flies directly in the face of any concern for climate change.

I heard the Taoiseach and probably the Minister rightly condemn Vladimir Putin as an imperialist. His attack on Ukraine is an imperialist attack, absolutely. Are there any other imperialists in the world? Who might they be? If Putin's invasions of Ukraine is imperialist - and it is - was the United States's invasion of Iraq imperialist? The answer is "Yes". Was its invasion of Afghanistan imperialist? The answer is "Yes". Is its arming of the Saudi dictatorship to conduct a bloody war in Yemen imperialist? The answer is "Yes". Is the European Union's and the United States's support for an Israeli apartheid state involved in crimes against humanity against the Palestinian people part of a western imperialist project to have an ally in the Middle East to help keep that region under its thumb? The answer is "Yes". The Minister knows it. The double standards of the European Union in terms of foreign policy are despicable. While the Minister rightly calls out the imperialism of Putin and says we should be concerned about it, he does not mention US, British or French imperialism, even though they have been as guilty of brutal, murderous, unjustified wars and of backing rotten and criminal regimes. A proud tradition goes back to the independence of this State and to James Connolly and the leaders of 1916 of opposing imperialism. That is why we must defend neutrality and oppose the Minister's attempts to shatter it.

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