Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I stand before the Minister of State as the last speaker. I will make no apologies for asking him and the Government to raise their voices to use our neutrality in the most positive way possible. Last Saturday, I awoke to news headlines saying that Biden did not think the conditions were right to talk peace. We have to raise our voice to talk for peace with regard to the war in Ukraine and all the other wars causing misery, death, destruction and starvation.

On the same day that Biden said the conditions were not right, the same news bulletin told us that the United States had unveiled its latest hi-tech strategic bomber. The Minister of State might listen for that alone. A B-21 bomber is capable of carrying a nuclear payload and can be flown without a crew on board. This is for the new generation. The US is missing the point that with nuclear bombs, there is no new generation. This was on the same day that Biden said the conditions were not right for peace. Does the Minister of State know how much the United States will spend on each plane? It will spend $750 million to fly it without a pilot and to have dual capacity for nuclear and regular bombs for the new generation. It will buy 100 of those.

I ask the Minister to take that on top of the comments of Josep Borrell who semi-apologised for telling us everything outside of Europe is a jungle. In fact, he did not apologise at all and instead added to the analogy that everything outside Europe is lawless. That is the Europe we have become. I am a proud European with intimate family connections with Europe. I talk today in the context of the agenda that is coming up next week about security and external relations in our southern neighbourhood. I put it in context: 25,313 people died or went missing between 2014 and 2022 in the Mediterranean and an additional 950 people are recorded as dead or missing since 2004. The total number of people dead or missing in Europe and the Mediterranean is 26,218 people. All data are from the Missing Migrants Project.

I mention that not to say that one death is worse than another, but to emphasise that this is all part of fortress Europe and building up what Borrell wants - a garden inside of walls, physically and metaphorically speaking, with a jungle outside. That is what the European project has become. We have twisted language on its head. We have taken our concept of neutrality - a principle that we hold dear, which has served us well and allowed us to get membership of the Security Council, albeit on a temporary basis, and to be a trusted voice in the world - and we have stretched that to the point where elasticity has no meaning anymore.

We have joined a Ukraine defence contact group. The meetings have taken place in NATO headquarters and Ireland has participated in six of them. Time precludes me from going through the bullet points with regard to them. The EU military assistance mission has also been stretched beyond capacity. We talk about neutrality meaning something, except when very senior spokespeople tell us it is a policy decision as to whether we lose our neutrality or the triple lock.

I will use my voice for as long as I can to say this must stop being done in our name. The overwhelming feedback from all the polls is that people wish us to use our voice as a neutral country for peace in the world, not to add to more militaristic states. That is exactly what has happened. The European project has been transformed from a peace project into a military project and a huge industrial-military complex. I was sickened to read about the amount of money we are spending through the European project on military spending. Some of the budgets - there is a whole list of them - have increased thousandfold while something like 800 million people are on the verge of starvation. The rich G7 countries are telling us that.

When I see that the agenda for next week's meeting covers Ukraine and Russia, energy and economy, security and defence, the southern neighbourhood and external relations, I want to know where our independent voice is. That voice is needed to point out, as friends should do for one another, that the wrong track is being taken. That is what friends do; they talk honestly and openly to their friends to ask them to change because what they are doing is causing death and destruction. I do not know what the shake of the Minister of State's head means but I am out of time and he is lucky.

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