Report on Neutrality meeting in Dublin
25 June 2023
The Left Bloc in the European Parliament called a meeting in Dublin for June 24th. Around 150 people attended. There were a range of speakers, the MEPs Clare Daly & Mick Wallace, the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis sent in a video message. There were also two peace activists from the US and German MP Seven Dagdalen from Die Linke.
All of the speeches addressed Michael D. Higgins comments on the drift towards NATO and reasons why should oppose this. It was pointed out by all that NATO was a military alliance it was not a defence organisation, nor did it have as its mission peace. Nor indeed as Dagdalen pointed out did it have a mission to promote democratic values as is being increasingly claimed by Irish media. It never had any problems with Portugal under the Salazar dictatorship or even Greece under the colonels, just like it currently has no problem with Erdogan in Turkey.
Clare Daly attacked some of the spurious arguments being put forward by the Irish government and the scare tactics about communications infrastructure, which was privately owned and consisted of a grand total of six cables off the Irish coast. She pointed out that when the Nord Stream was attacked NATO did nothing about it and the Irish government said nothing either. This was scaremongering to convince us to join NATO.
By far the best speaker was Lowkey, the Iraqi – British rapper who spoke about Iraq, Palestine and also went through the nature of the forum who the speakers were and their links to the arms industry, with various speakers from Think Tanks financed by companies such as Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.
There was some discussion at the end with various contributions made from the floor. Clare Daly finished up the meeting with a call to go forward and organise on the issue and people were invited to protest at the Dublin sessions of the government organized forum.