Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Tá sé thar a bheith tábhachtach chuile dheis a thapú chun a chur in iúl gur tír neodrach muid agus ár nguthanna a úsáid go glórmhar chun a chur in iúl nach bhfuil muid sásta fáil réidh leis an bpolasaí sin in ainneoin an bhrú dhamanta atá á chur orainne agus ar an Dáil ón Tánaiste, ón Taoiseach, ón Rialtas agus ón bhfóram atá ar siúl faoi láthair.

I welcome the opportunity to use my voice for as long as I am here and for as often as I can to say that we are a neutral country. We are proud of our neutrality. The fact it is being used in a very elastic way by various governments is neither here nor there. I am zoning in on the will of the people and they have made that well known repeatedly in different ways, including in the various pobalbhreitheanna which have taken place.

This pre-Council statements session on the meeting that is going to take place has on its agenda security and defence, migration, and foreign relations, and I would like to zone in on two of those. If we keep using the lens of security and defence and use that to manipulate language and fear, we are heading for a very dangerous world. Our President spoke recently and I do not wish to draw him into the debate at all except to say that I disagree with him on only one item. He used the word “drifting”, but I would use the word “choreographed”. We are being carefully choreographed into, to put it at its mildest, a more militarised Europe.

The figures are completely frightening. The EU is creating an army, although that word is not used, and the member states have committed to growing defence expenditure by €70 billion in 2025. This will bring the annual EU spend on military and weapons technology to €284 billion per year.

The US Secretary of Defence, Lloyd Austin, prior to his holding this position was the director of the arms company Raytheon Technologies Corporation, which has increased the value of its shares throughout the war in Ukraine by 17%. Ireland has credibility as a proud neutral country, wrought out of pain and suffering from our history of being colonised, from a Famine, and from our experience of mass immigration. Our policy has been wrought out of that and we should use that to facilitate, promote and take an active part in dialogue and diplomacy. The attack on neutrality is not accidental and neither is it a once-off. It is part, as I said, of a carefully choreographed direction in which we are being pushed.

If we look at what is happening in respect of the war in Ukraine, which I am on record as repeatedly deploring, the move to militarisation in Europe had gone on well before that. With each new treaty we were given further declarations. For example, with the Nice treaty, we were given the Seville declaration that this treaty would not interfere with our neutrality.

The plan for EU militarism has been under way for a long time. We have the European Defence Agency; Permanent Structured Cooperation, or PESCO; the European funds; the European Peace Facility; the Partnership for Peace; the EU battle groups; the European External Action Service; and the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, or Frontex. It is worth reading all of this because one forgets. It is like a jigsaw because it is being built up bit by bit.

Jean-Claude Juncker described PESCO, which was activated in 2017, as the Sleeping Beauty of the Lisbon treaty because it had not been used since the treaty’s incorporation in 2008. It has since been used and we took part in that following a two-hour debate and vague threats that if we did not sign up, our interest in Europe would be jeopardised. The Taoiseach at the time said that we must participate to deal with the threat then, which was to counter the threat of Trump and Brexit. Today it is the threat posed by the war in Ukraine and the increasing wars, as they see it.

We are constitutionally committed to peace and to friendly co-operation among the nations of the world under generally recognised principles of international law and nowhere do I see that framework. I do not see that we are looking at security and defence through the framework of an overall human rights perspective.

Our hypocrisy is absolutely staggering with regard to Palestine, Fortress Europe and what is happening in the Mediterranean. This year alone, 1,871 people have died or have gone missing in the Mediterranean. That is the Missing Migrant Project. Recently, a boat from Libya carrying hundreds of smuggled migrants sank in front of a Greek coastguard vessel taking 82 lives, with up to 500 still missing. I mention that because Frontex, which is the border entity that has been built up by the EU with 10,000 personnel, had its boats in the vicinity. Frontex saw that boat and from what I can see it did not take any action.

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