Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

At the centre of Joe Biden's speech to the House last week was talk of a new cold war, in reality, pitching that the key struggle in the world is between democracy and autocracy. However, he failed to mention that the US provides military support to the majority of dictatorships in the world. Really the idea is to have a US-led NATO in the West against the east of China, Russia and their allies. It is very clear that this Government has no doubt about where it stands on that and would like Ireland to abandon all of what is left of neutrality and align with NATO. Public opinion remains a very important obstacle to what the Government would like. Just over a month ago, the Taoiseach's predecessor said that we might have a citizens' assembly on neutrality, with a random selection of citizens coming together to discuss neutrality. That was then downgraded last week to a special forum on neutrality inspired by the principles of the citizens' assembly. I assume that the key principle of a random selection of citizens has been abandoned because the Government is scared of the people's opinion on this matter.

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