Go raibh maith agat, a Cheann Comhairle. Over 24,000 Irish citizens who had been living peaceful, happy lives in the Middle East are now stranded due to a war waged by the US and Israel. Their parents are worried. This Government must do everything possible to guarantee their safety and welfare and to get back home to Ireland those who wish to return here. Hard-pressed Irish householders, farmers and businesses are being fiercely hit in their pockets, whether directly or indirectly, because of this Israeli-US war. They are being ripped off and fleeced by rocketing fuel costs, some of it price-gouging by companies. As Deputy Aird referred to, the Government is responsible for almost two thirds of this cost through its gouging. These international issues like Iran are therefore highly relevant to the Irish people, no matter what any of the foreign-funded, pseudo-patriotic charlatan groups online might like to tell us. Aside from our neutrality, they are highly relevant to everything and directly hit us in our pockets. However, most horrendous of all is the human cost of war. Mothers and fathers have buried 165 children after an attack on a girls’ primary school by the United States and Israel. We can see from Gaza to Iran that this is what liberation by these western monsters looks like in reality. Line upon line of tiny white shrouds is the defining image of this conflict for me. We know Netanyahu is a genocidal monster with a seemingly insatiable bloodlust for destruction and endless war, which he is still carrying out against the West Bank as well as Gaza. After the full-scale assault against Iran, he even admitted this was the day he had been dreaming about for 40 years. He has often spoken of conquering Iran so that the plan for a two-state solution with Palestinians living side by side with an Israeli state is completely unviable and will not have any backers across the Middle East. That is the reason Netanyahu wants to destroy Iran. There is no other. He sees this US Presidency as his best possible opportunity of fulfilling his 40-year-old fantasy. Trump said that the US attacked Iran because the country could not, in his words, allow it to have a nuclear weapon. This is the same person who said back in June that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been "obliterated". We know Israel is in the only country in the Middle East with a nuclear warhead and of course the US is the only country that has ever used one. We have heard all this total rubbish before. Back in the early 2000s I can remember the oft-repeated lie about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which we all knew was a lie. One million deaths and the partial destruction of that civilisation later, everybody found out it was a complete lie. Unfortunately it was just regurgitated by many sections of the media and the political establishment. You wonder when they will ever learn. I guess they already knew what the truth was because they have been providing cover for western war crimes. There are a multiplicity of news sources these days so there is no excuse for wilful ignorance. We do not know where these reckless and illegal actions are going to lead us, in terms of the potential chaos across the Middle East. It is a potential Pandora's box, a tinderbox really. We know Iran may have a brutal, fundamentalist regime that has been massacring its own people but there is no evidence Iran is building a nuclear weapon. That is according to the head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi. We know that Israel and the US have no regard whatsoever for the welfare of the ordinary Iranian people, whose decision it is to make. Just one day before the strikes began, Oman's foreign minister announced that Iran had agreed to submit to full UN verification. Diplomacy was working. The UN Secretary General said that the military operation was squandering the opportunity for a negotiated resolution. Instead, Trump, supposedly the hard man who yet seems to be Netanyahu's poodle, chose bombs over diplomacy and a deal which experts say Iran was open to. This is not strength. It is an absolutely reckless foreign policy gamble. We do not know where it is going to lead us. A lot of these people are quite compromised, as we learned from the whole Epstein episode. What has been Ireland's response as a neutral State, apart from allowing a war port to be used in Shannon? The foreign affairs Minister, Deputy McEntee, said that she cannot really say whether the US or Israel's strikes on Iran are illegal under international law. I wonder why not. Why is it so hard to state the truth, as Spain was prepared to do? It is also a member of NATO. Why are we so beholden to the White House that we cannot utter the truth? Surely the truth matters in all these things.

Sentiment score: -0.14