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

It is particularly appropriate that the Ceann Comhairle mentioned the horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima as we mark the first anniversary of Putin's bloody, murderous and criminal invasion of Ukraine. The United States, the biggest power in the world in two days with nuclear weapons incinerated more than 300,000 people. Today, Vladimir Putin, another nuclear power, said he is ramping up his nuclear arsenal and is considering withdrawing from the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, START. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which was set up after the horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, set a thing called the doomsday clock. This January they set that clock at the closest point to midnight that it has been set since Nagasaki and Hiroshima. They set the doomsday clock, by which they mean the prospect of nuclear Armageddon, at 90 seconds to midnight largely because of the terrifying prospect of the war in Ukraine escalating to the point of the use of nuclear weapons. It is worth considering what they said, their body includes nuclear scientists and ten Nobel Peace Prize laureates. They said that:

The US government, its NATO allies and Ukraine have a multitude of channels for dialogue; we urge leaders to explore all of them to their fullest ability to turn back the Clock.

Nuclear weapons are the weapons of the psychopath. Those who used them in Nagasaki and Hiroshima were operating a psychopathic murderous logic. Vladimir Putin has rained death and destruction on the people of Ukraine and is operating a psychopathic logic. However, it is also the case that NATO, with its own bloody history, is seeking to do nothing other than escalate this conflict to the terrifying possibility that we could have a nuclear situation. Against that background, what does the Tánaiste do? As the Tánaiste of a neutral country, who was formerly Taoiseach, he says now is the time to reconsider the triple lock, to review essentially our position of neutrality and to deploy 30 troops to participate in the war in Ukraine in flagrant breach of our neutral status. When he was in government in 2003 he facilitated 1 million US troops to go through Shannon Airport in order to prosecute another bloody war. Does the Tánaiste not think, one year into the war in Ukraine, that the lesson is that a neutral country should be using its voice on the international stage to call for peace, negotiations and to stop the terrifying escalation of this conflict that we are witnessing which could bring the world to the brink of conflict?

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