Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The statue of James Connolly is behind us and the portrait of Countess Markievicz is in the hall. They were two of Ireland's greatest revolutionaries who stood for working people and stood against empire. They set up the Irish Neutrality League in 1914. That is where our tradition of neutrality comes from. They were two of the greatest revolutionaries and they were revered by the people of this country because they opposed war, empire and colonialism. That is where the tradition comes from. The Irish Government wants to trash the tradition established by Connolly and Markievicz and the people who led the Irish revolution against colonialism, war and empire, by aligning us with the embryonic European empire and project of militarisation in Europe which is directly aligned with NATO and which is dominated by the major western imperial powers. That is the simple truth.

The triple lock, as inadequate as the United Nations is, prevents us from deploying troops where empires are fighting against each other. It prevents us from sending troops and taking sides in battles between empires, because our tradition is to oppose empire. The Government wants to be able to deploy troops at the behest of Ursula von der Leyen, Olaf Scholz or, for that matter, a US administration which it goes grovelling over to and which insults and humiliates it as with the Trump administration. The Government wants to allow US troops to go through Shannon as they rain down missiles in Yemen. Trump is a pig and a horror, a warmonger and an imperialist but Ursula von der Leyen greenlighted the genocide in Gaza and Olaf Scholz invited the war criminal, Netanyahu, to Germany. Germany is the major provider of arms and weapons to those carrying out a genocide. Why would we want to deploy troops in any way connected with military powers that are guilty of arming a genocide? The Israeli genocide against Gaza, the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and the apartheid could not happen without US and European money and arms. This is what the Government wants to involve us in and smash up the tradition of Connolly and Markievicz, which stands against all of that.

We will pay a price for this because the genocide in Gaza is coming home to roost if our sons and daughters are sent out to fight in wars for European or US empires. The Government now wants to spend billions of euro more on weapons that should rightly go to housing, health and education. Connolly would turn in his grave.

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