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

The Minister of State was reported as saying, I think on Friday of last week, that the Irish people were not ready to join NATO yet. He revealed the cynical agenda and the attempt to condition Irish public opinion by exploiting the tragic situation in Ukraine to try to shred the last remnants of Ireland's neutrality. We all of course condemn in the strongest terms Putin's bloody imperialist invasion and occupation of Ukraine and the attempt to crush the legitimate right of Ukrainians to self-determination.

If anybody believes for one minute that this motivates Irish Government policy, the policy of the European Union or the major powers that dominate NATO, particularly the United States, France, the UK and so on, and that they have some principled opposition to military occupation, war, or that they support legitimate forms of resistance and struggles for self-determination, then they need to look again at what the European Union is doing.

Let us look at Palestine. A criminal siege of Gaza has been going on for 15 years, creating a permanent humanitarian crisis in a flagrant and ongoing breach of international law. There is ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank. Some 750,000 illegal settlers are on land that, under international law, is Palestinian. Are there any sanctions against Israel or any mention of sanctions against it in the Taoiseach's speech? Is there any support for Palestinian armed resistance against an illegal occupation? There is none at all. If a Palestinian picked up a gun, there would be condemnation all round. I am not proposing that they pick up guns, but could we at least take the guns out of the Israelis' hands? Could we stop arming the Israelis and giving them favourable trade status? There is not a word, because Israel is an ally of the powers that dominate the European Union and NATO, so Ireland does not care about the crimes it commits against the Palestinian people and it is not going to do anything about those crimes.

Another particularly disgraceful example of the gross hypocrisy and double standards at work in the European Union and in our Government policy relates to the situation in Western Sahara. We heard from representatives of the occupied, oppressed people of Western Sahara, who have been subject to a brutal military occupation by Morocco since the 1970s. The United Nations believes it is an unjust occupation. Most importantly, the European Court of Justice has issued three rulings saying that the trade deal and fisheries deal which have been concluded over the last years between the European Union and Morocco to steal the fish and phosphates from the people of Western Sahara is illegal. The European courts annulled that deal, but the European Council and the European Commission have appealed the courts' rulings. Ireland went along with it. It is outrageous. The only country which had the courage to stand with European legal decisions and international law, in insisting that the people of Western Sahara had the right to self-determination and to oppose a deal that they had not played any role in assenting to, which is required under international law, was Sweden. Ireland, pathetically and outrageously, went along with it.

Let us not forget about Saudi Arabia. The irony is that we will increase our imports of energy from Saudi Arabia, which has simultaneously increased its oil and gas imports from Russia. Saudi Arabia is effectively laundering Russian gas and oil, but we will do more deals with the Saudis to deal with our energy crisis. It is the most brutal and autocratic regime imaginable. Let us do away with the hypocrisy. The Irish Government wants to shred our military neutrality and our political neutrality, which we should retain. It wants to abandon the revolutionary traditions that founded this State and to join with the hypocrites and warmongers like the United States, France and Britain, which have foreign policy riddled with double standards.

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