Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputies Connolly and Pringle and the Independent Group for tabling this timely motion before the Chamber. I am sure that when they decided to table it, they had not envisaged the horrors we are witnessing in the Middle East and Gaza. To go back to where it comes from, we have been witnessing the erosion, slow up to a point, of our neutrality over recent years. This has been led by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. It has rapidly speeded up. The drumbeat of PESCO and how we engage more with European armed forces has been rapidly speeded up since Putin's brutal invasion of Ukraine.

Ukraine has been very much used as an excuse to state, as the Government amendment to this motion does, that as a highly globalised country Ireland cannot rely on geographic isolation for our security nor isolate ourselves from world events. Nobody is arguing we should isolate ourselves from world events. In fact, we in this House on the left lead the chants to support the people of Gaza and Palestine and get rid of the brutal oppression that Israeli forces are visiting on them.

We must remember that millions of troops passed through Shannon during the Iraq war and this is likely to continue unless we really question where we are going with our neutrality. The Government side will argue we have to take ourselves seriously in the big bad world and that we have to work with like-minded people. This may have held some water until two weeks ago. Now it is completely blown out of the water. If we look at what has been going on with EU leaders in recent days, one after another every Prime Minister is going to Israel to line up with the butchers of Gaza, shake their hands and put themselves on side. The Government expects us to believe it when it states we must work with our EU partners. We must tell our EU partners they are not doing it in our name when they line up with those who are killing a child every 15 minutes. This will accelerate when the power goes off in the hospitals in Gaza and the incubators are turned off. We cannot speak about this except in terms of genocide. We have to divorce ourselves from any relationship with it.

The motion is timely.

I will finish by quoting from the Rebel website, "In a world already buckling under the weight of multiple, interlocking crises—rapidly expanding inequality, climate catastrophe, a brutal, protracted war in the Ukraine, the growing menace of a resurgent far Right—the turn to merciless slaughter in Gaza has brought us to a precipice." The article on the same website continued by stating that the chant "In our thousands/ In our millions/ We are all Palestinians" is not just "a neat rhyme" and that this was because:

Whatever corner of the globe we ... [live in], humanity’s collective future is very much on the line, right now, in Gaza and ... [in] Palestine. The stakes could not be higher.

On 4 November, the Irish Neutrality League, along with the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the Irish Anti-War Movement will be holding a demonstration at 1 p.m., leaving from Parnell Square. I urge everybody who believes in what James Connolly said, that "we serve neither King nor Kaiser, but Ireland", to be on that demonstration.

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