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

I see the Green Party has once more wrestled with its conscience and, unsurprisingly, once more the Green Party has emerged victorious in ditching another one of its so-called principles by signing up with Fine Fáil and Fine Gael to abandon the triple lock. The Government and the Taoiseach like to present this abandonment of the triple lock and this abandonment of a commitment in the programme for Government as a response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. However, that is not true, is it? If you go back 20 years, you can read a policy document from Fine Gael called Beyond Neutrality, where the triple lock system is described as being a "political straitjacket”. If you go through the record of the Dáil, you will see the Taoiseach himself in 2008 describing the triple lock as not right and saying that such decisions should be made in the Dáil and or by an elected European Parliament. Is it not the case, then, that it was always Fine Gael's plan to seize the appropriate moment to try and abandon the triple lock, which would free up a Government with majority Dáil support to send troops abroad, for example, to the Middle East, to participate in US-led military adventures?

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