Richard Boyd Barrett: Will Taoiseach Condemn US and Israel?

Taoiseach, you have rightly and repeatedly condemned Putin for a criminal, barbaric, imperialist attack on Ukraine. Will you do the same when it comes to what Trump and the Israeli regime are now doing to Iran and to Lebanon? Bombing the hell out of civilians, infrastructure in Iran, in the case of Israel now ethnically cleansing South Lebanon. And indeed will you condemn Trump's suggestion that he might quote take over Cuba, attack another country in exactly the criminal, entirely unjustified, illegal way that Putin attacked Ukraine. Have you got consistency in your principles? Will you condemn it and call it out when it's done by the United States and the regime in Israel? Deputy Boyd Barrett, in terms of, I mean I made it clear by the way in my speech in the White House about Ireland's adherence to the UN nations and to the need for UN mandate and to the international rules in terms of an international rules based order. And I take it as strongly as I did for the need for the war to end and for a peaceful resolution. We are dealing with a very repressive regime in Iran, which has for years now been conducting a surrogate war in many respects on an ongoing basis against many, many countries. And particularly in the Middle East. More repressive. Sorry. Engage separately. Much more repressive than Saudi, I would argue. Well, I mean, sorry, any regime that executes up to 60, I don't know, we haven't got a precise number, but thousands of their own citizens who went out in the street to protest were mowed down. I'm not defending any other regime or that, but this is a particularly. Deputy, it's not a back and forth. Respect for other members as well. The contrast with Ukraine is fairly, the contrast with Ukraine is very different. But you'll never acknowledge it. Deputy, please. But you yourself, Deputy, Morphy and others will never acknowledge that point. President Zelensky was a security nobody before he was invaded. I'm not, I don't, I believe in dialogue. I believe in international rules-based order. I believe in a UN mandate. Although the UN is paralyzed. The UN Security Council, why we're doing the triple lock, is because the Security Council is paralyzed. It's going to be very hard to get a peacekeeping mission going. But now, because of the Security Council, UNIFIL will end at the end of this year. And the opportunities for Irish peacekeepers, which we've been doing uninterrupted since 1958, is very much in the balance now. But no one seems to care about that on the opposition side in terms of our future role in peacekeeping. And on Cuba, it should be resolved by dialogue. But again, there's another regime that has a certain glorified sort of narrative around it here. But it has been quite a repressive regime as well. And in my view, has oppressed its own people for far too long. It needs to get with it in the modern era. It needs to engage in a sensible dialogue and try and get a resolution. It doesn't need, in my view, any external interventions. I've been to Cuba in the past as a Minister of Foreign Affairs. I was probably one of two or three European ministers at that time in the 07-10 period where I visited Cuba hoping that we could get a more liberal view of things. But even then, they didn't release political prisoners that we had sought to release off. And I think President Castro and his successor, his brother, ruled with an iron fist. Wrongly, in my view. And the consequences for its citizens have been fairly dire. And hence, many, many have left and gone off to the United States and elsewhere. So it's not no one case is simple. There's a complexity and a history to a lot of these issues that defy simplistic sloganeering. And I think I've dealt with the triple lock issue, the UN mandate.