Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I thank the Acting Leader for amending the Order of Business to allow me to make a few comments. I welcome the Minister of State to the debate. I apologise to Senator Mooney for shouting at him. I believe it is unwise to deal in visual images because we could get into a competition over which visual images are worst and such images would get worse and worse. Many Members from all sides of the House take great exception to some of the campaigns concerning abortion which involve the use of the most appalling visual images. Perhaps we use visual images too well in other areas.

I do not wish to launch into a denunciation of the Government. I find what has happened in the Middle East so distressing and disturbing that I move beyond political denunciation. Since I do not wish to use silly language, I will only say it is a pity we have retreated from a position of independence. It may be the consequence of EU membership, the collapse of the Soviet Union, affluence or the decline in the influence of the Church and its institutions.

The timidity of our Government and the EU is, to put it mildly, profoundly disappointing. Timidity is the only word one can use to describe it. Intellectual hoops have been jumped through to justify the peculiar and extraordinary treatment of Hamas. People have spoken about the need to support moderate governments in the Middle East by contrast with governments like the Hamas-led Government in Palestine. The royal family in Saudi Arabia, which is composed of Wahhabi Muslim fanatics and out of whom comes the ideology of Osama Bin Laden, is deemed to be moderate, while the secularist Baath party in Syria and, formerly, Iraq is deemed to be extremist.

One ends up in extraordinary moral quagmires if one does not fundamentally state that what we want to see in the Middle East — Iraq, Iran, Syria, Israel and Palestine — is a just settlement and that our position is that of even-handedly and carefully supporting justice. This is why the selective use of language is so bad for our perception of independence. We use language about Hamas and Hizbollah which is correct but then we look at the deaths of 650,000 people in Iraq. I acknowledge that this is not a precise figure. The authors of the report in question accept that there is an inaccuracy of approximately plus or minus 50%. The figure could be 300,000 or 900,000.

May God forgive me but I do not think this really matters. Irrespective of whether the figure is 300,000 or 900,000, it is a blot on the sense of morality of the Western world that anybody could believe that this cause was worth that consequence and that the achievement of elimination of Saddam Hussein was worth this. Those nearest to us in London and further away in Washington, DC, have effectively said that and, in some cases, have attempted to argue with the figures. However, on this occasion, it was a half-hearted argument. We now know the scale of it.

Today, seven young Americans were killed in Iraq in pursuit of this now impossible target of achieving some sort of stabilisation. I appeal to the Government to get off the fence and speak for the Irish people about what they see to be the profoundly amoral and dangerously polarised world that is being constructed in which the Western world is ranged on one side and an increasingly alienated, hostile and negatively disposed Islamic world is ranged on the other side. Islam is a religion of considerable nobility and generosity. It has a record of religious tolerance from which Christians could learn. During most of the existence of Islam, pogroms of Jews or Christians did not occur in Islamic countries. They were not perfectly treated but a pogrom never occurred.

The people of this country want something they used to have, namely, a brave and independent foreign policy which calls death by violence and murder "murder" regardless of who carries it out. It states to all participants in an horrendous and horrific struggle whatever their position and alliance that when one kills other people in pursuit of a political objective one is profoundly wrong and acting in a manner destructive for the future. Will the Government resume the position Ireland used to have in the face of horrific abuse by superpowers? I hope it will result from this debate.