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

First, I express my horror and outrage at the attack on civilian infrastructure and specifically the attack on the children's hospital in Kyiv by the Russian military. It is absolutely horrendous to see the pictures from that hospital. It certainly seems to be a clear war crime by the Putin regime. In relation to the summit, this was heralded as a peace summit. Obviously, though, it is not a summit that ended in peace and it was never going to be a summit that was going to end in peace. I will quote from Wolfgang Münchau, who is neither a radical leftist nor a Putinist of any sort. He wrote an article in The New Statesman in which he said very bluntly:

The ... “Peace Summit” on Ukraine failed – deservedly so. Of the 102 state representatives who gathered in Bürgenstock on 15-16 June, 22 refused to sign the final declaration. It was clearly not a peace summit since Russia was absent. But it was also not a solidarity summit. Some of the world’s largest countries, like India and Brazil, were amongst those who refused to be co-opted into the Western position. This is not how peace is done.

That is very true. In reality, this was a summit of the West and some of its allies. There were notable absences in terms of those countries not present. China, for example, chose not to attend. Equally, major countries from the global south attended but chose not to sign. There were also notable inclusions. Did the Irish State have anything to say about the fact that Israel was present and signed this declaration condemning all of Russia's war crimes while literally at the same time committing exactly the same, if not worse, war crimes? Was there no pointing out of the extreme hypocrisy of this? This creates problems for the countries of the global south in respect of why there are these double standards. Some of them oppose western imperialism. Some of them may be in the camp of Russia, but some of them may be looking to have a consistent position of opposing Russian war crimes as well opposing Israeli war crimes and western imperialism.

I have a concrete question. Has Ireland taken or is the Government considering taking any initiatives in this regard? We are, relatively speaking, in the global north but we are not a traditional military power, a major imperial country and so on. I refer to working with the likes of Brazil, where Lula has come out in favour of a peace plan to try to have a real peace process in terms of Ukraine.

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