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

As many other speakers have said, Putin's invasion of Ukraine is a bloody, unjustified and criminal endeavour, which has led to absolute carnage. That carnage continues. The scale of human devastation is unknown because both sides do not want to admit to how many people have been killed. Some estimates suggest that more than 1 million people have either lost their lives or have been injured and maimed. Ukraine admits to about 50,000 of its military personnel being killed, although some suggest that the numbers killed could be double that, and hundreds of thousands more have been injured and maimed. In Russia, some estimates suggest there might be 250,000 military personnel dead and hundreds of thousands more maimed and injured. One report I read recently suggested that Russian ministries had distributed more than 200,000 prosthetic limbs because so many soldiers are losing their arms and legs. It is disgusting.

Undoubtedly Putin is the instigator of this unjustified and imperialist endeavour. The Taoiseach is absolutely correct to call it imperialism. The people of Ukraine have been absolutely justified in resisting this brutal invasion of their country. The problem I have, and it is why I believe our neutrality is in danger, is that the Government and European Union leaders go from that to say that their main concern in all of this is to defend the international rules-based order and our neutrality and imply that they have a consistent set of principles when it comes to opposing imperialism, brutal invasions and wars. That self-evidently is not true. We have had 19 rounds of sanctions imposed on Russia by the European Union but not a single round of sanctions by the European Union against Israel for the crimes it has committed against the Palestinian people, even when those crimes have reached the level of Israel being in the dock for genocide, and to my mind being undoubtedly guilty of genocide. There has not been a single round of sanctions.

You would believe in here, with the speeches from the Ministers, that when they rightly describe Putin as a brutal imperialist thug that he is the only one in the world. There is barely a mention of the genocidal slaughter being inflicted on the Palestinians. That slaughter could not have happened were it not for another imperialist power, or several of them. The United States has armed Israel to commit the genocide against the Palestinians and is every bit as much an imperialist power as Putin and his regime or, indeed, the more minor players in the European Union, such as Germany, Britain, France and Italy, which have also provided the military means to Israel to continue the slaughter and refuse to impose any sanctions.

If the United States and the European Union actually do not show any serious regard for international law, or for any sort of consistency when it comes to principles, is it a surprise that the signal sent out is that all of it is nonsense and the truth is you take what you can get through military means? I would go further and say that many in the European Union have long wanted to see a European army and to ratchet up military expenditure. By the way, in the European Union this expenditure had dramatically increased before Russia's invasion of Ukraine as part of the ongoing process of militarisation in the European Union and of NATO expansion. Russia spends a shocking 19% of GDP on arms. This is on military expenditure. It is starving and immiserating its own people. It spends $149 billion. Do you know how much NATO spends? It spends $1.5 trillion, which is ten times what Russia spends on arms.

Thousands of billions of euro that should be going into health, housing, education and addressing the cost of living are used to make missiles, weapons, bullets and ammunition, which are then sold on if they are not used in this war and given to Israel, Saudi Arabia, dictatorships and brutal regimes all over the world, which are also guilty of inflicting horror on their populations. If we are serious about trying to stop the slaughter in Ukraine or anywhere else, we have to have consistent principles and we should not be aligning ourselves with any of these powers in the world that are guilty of this imperialist competition and militarism, which will drive this world into a very dangerous and dark place and which would make even Gaza and Ukraine not look like a tea party because it is so horrific. It could bring us to an even worse place.

See this speech in context