Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

For six consecutive weekends now, tens of thousands of people have marched in Irish cities in solidarity with the Palestinian people and in opposition to Israeli state terror. I can think of no other event in my lifetime as an activist that has made that happen - not the water charges, the Iraq war or the Gulf War. It is pretty much unique. The protests, and the sentiment among the broad mass of people towards the genocide, can have a significant impact on the so-called neutrality debate.

While the Tánaiste had hoped that a stacked consultative forum would nudge public opinion towards support for closer military co-operation with EU powers and NATO, Israel's war has, I strongly suspect, moved public opinion in the opposite direction entirely. Not only will that war provoke opposition to militarism but also a profound distrust of precisely those forces the Government would like to align this country's foreign policy more closely with. Who defended Israel's bombardment of Gaza? Who defended the mass murder of men, women and children that arose from that, only the US, the UK, France and Germany?

Whereas Dame Richardson's report states that the majority view from the forum was to see NATO as a defensive military alliance, Israel's war has shown that the leading NATO countries support a brutal, barbarous and bloody assault on a defenceless population. Unfortunately for the Tánaiste, Ursula von der Leyen did more to undermine the Government's policy in ten minutes than any number of consultative forums might do to promote it in a lifetime.

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