Richard Boyd Barrett: EU Fuels Global Arms Race

Okay Minister, the Minister before you lauded the European Union for being a place of values and talked about its commitment to international law, to the rule of law, and also was somewhat aghast that people suggested that Europe was guilty of a move towards militarisation. Now I would put it to you that in fact if you were to characterise the major value currently of the European Union it is precisely that it is the biggest contributor to a massive increase in global arms expenditure. The global arms expenditure is now up to 2,887 billion euro, 2.8 trillion. The biggest contributor to that increase, with 14% increase last year, the European Union. And that should hardly surprise us because Ursula von der Leyen, former arms seller when she was a minister for Germany selling arms to left, right and sundry, has argued for the rearmament of Europe and massive increases in global expenditure and European expenditure on weapons. So that is what Europe is actually doing and by the way it spends four times more on weapons than Russia. And then you add to that the trillion that the United States spends. Clearly militarisation, spending money on weapons, doesn't actually do anything to deter war. That's very clear when you look at the balance of global arms expenditure. But where the notion of commitments to international law or any kind of values is exposed as complete nonsense is when you look at the European Union's relationship to the state of Israel and the crimes that it is committing. Even before the genocidal assault on Gaza, Israel has shown itself to be the world's number one enemy of international law. It refuses to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty but we all know it has about 200 nuclear weapons. It doesn't think that law applies to them. Trump thinks it's okay to bomb Iran and Israel does because they might have nuclear weapons but Israel won't even sign the international treaty to restrict their use. It denies, since 1948 when it ethnically cleansed nearly a million Palestinians, it has denied under international law the right to return to the Palestinians have, leaving millions of Palestinians displaced all over the Middle East. It has a law explicitly denying the Palestinians the right to self-determination and granting that right only to people of the Jewish faith. It presides over an apartheid regime according to every serious human rights organisation and it has been collectively punishing the two million people of Gaza since 2006 with a criminal siege. And then you have the genocidal massacre of the last few years. Who provides the weapons? The European Union to a very significant extent. Germany. Germany. Who, as we speak, and I've just had a message from Mimi Tatlo Davali, a court where a young Irish citizen who was with four other people protesting against Elbit Systems, the major provider of weapons to Israel to commit the genocide against the Palestinians in an act of civil disobedience where there was no threat of violence to anybody. His mother is saying in the court at the moment they are being likened by the court, by the judge, to terrorists, to organised criminals and really setting them up as sort of horrible, dangerous people and making them very worrying about their treatment. And they appeal again to the Irish government to send monitors to that trial, which is an absolute travesty of justice. So I just want to conclude by saying with the European Union showing complete moral bankruptcy in the face of genocide, the worst crime it has possibly committed. Next week, Minister, this bill is going to come before the Dáil, the sanctions against the State of Israel bill. And what it says is because Ireland is a signatory to the Genocide Convention, it has a legal obligation not just to punish the crime of genocide but to prevent it and to use all reasonable means to do so. And this bill is calling for, across the board, economic sanctions. Will you support that bill next week when it comes in front of this House? I very much doubt it.