Seven Deadly Lies: Government Is Lying About Triple Lock

Lie no 1: “The triple lock means the UN has a veto over the deployment of Irish troops.”

This is a slimy and sneaky lie that is being repeated by every Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael politician with a social media account. The triple lock means that Irish troops can only be deployed if each of these conditions is satisfied: there must be approval from (i) the cabinet, (ii) the Dáil and (iii) there must be a mandate from the United Nations.

UN Mandates can come from the Security Council or General Assembly. The General Assembly cannot veto anything. This is the first part of the lie.

The second part is that our peacekeeping missions are being vetoed by imperial powers. The Russians have never vetoed our peacekeepers. They would, however, object to military threats. So would the US! The US and EU are in inter-imperialist conflict with Russia and China.

Micháel Martin in particular wants to dispense with the United Nations so he can ally us with the US & the EU.

We know this because he told us so: on 24th February he declared that Ireland was operating within the “rules-based international order”, which is NATO-code for “we do whatever we want and to hell with the UN”. He then went on to say “we are not neutral when Russia disregards all of these principles”.

Martin and his ilk want to remove the triple lock because they want us to line up in battle with the US and EU in their current and future imperialist wars against Russia, Iran or China.

We have no business sending our children to die in their inter-imperialist conflicts.

Lie no 2: “We need to defend ourselves against Russia”

In some places Russia has barely advanced 20 km in three years of war against NATO-armed and backed Ukraine. In fact, if the government removes the triple lock our army is more likely to threaten Russia as a part of a European army in Ukraine than vice versa!

As socialists we recognise that the Russian billionaire class and strongman Putin are not our friends. That does not mean that they are our main problem. Our problem is much closer to home - our pro-NATO establlishment.

Ordinary working people in this country struggle to get housing, hospital appointments, childcare places and nursing homes because of the artificial scarcity that facilitates large corporations to make huge profits at the expense of everyone else.

We need to defend ourselves against these parasites and vultures, not spend money to make profits for arms manufacturers so we can “tool up” to face off against an imaginary Russian foe.

Lie no 3: “We need to spend more on our military”

Our defence budget is amongst the lowest in Europe at 0.24% of our GDP - just over €1 billion. Obviously, the men and women of our defence forces need to be paid and treated well. However, the government would rather spend extra money on arms manufacturers and we have more pressing needs.

There are over a million people on hospital waiting lists and over 15,000 homeless people. We have the lowest spending on education in the OECD and the schools most in need of resources - DEIS schools - receive less than 0.14% of the overall education budget.

We don’t need to spend any more on weapons. There is enormous wealth in this country - at a minimum, we need wealth taxes and corporation taxes that properly fund services.

Lie no 4: “We should take care of our own defence and not rely on the British”

One quarter of this island is still occupied by an imperial power. The British government is one of the leading supporters of Israel and is leading the drive to enter a war against the nuclear-armed Russian federation.

Our government is falling over itself to back up the Brits. The people of Ireland struggled for centuries against colonisation and imperialism. We do not forget this. The tens of thousands of Irish people who stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people have not forgotten it either.

Fine Gael, in particular, rue the day that we wrested independence from Westminster. They are, in their bones, West-Brit sycophants who can’t wait to send young Irish men and women off to kill and die in a revival of the Crimean war. If they had their way, our men and women would be lowered into the ground to the strains of God Save the King, wrapped in the butcher’s apron.

Lie no 5: “We need to defend Ukraine”

We do not need to defend Ukraine. The Ukraine-NATO army has held its own against Russia for three years. Staggering amounts of weapons and money have been supplied to them by the US and Europe. Ahistorical propaganda is relentless and almost universal in the west. This reduces the war to some child’s story about evil Putin and defenceless Ukraine.

The truth is very different: NATO has actively participated in the war. Storm Shadow missiles, advanced naval drones, AWACS aircraft targeting Russian positions can only be operated directly by NATO personnel.

The war did not start in 2022. The US was directly involved in helping to overthrow the corrupt but nonetheless democratically elected government of Yanukovich in a coup d’etat in 2014.

Ukraine itself has some very disturbing traditions: the leading energy that drove the coup d’etat in 2014 came from neo-nazi paramilitary groups such as Praviy Sektor and Azov. There is a long tradition of russophobic ethno-nationalism, particularly in western Ukraine.

One consequence of this has been the suppression of Russian language rights. To this day, Ukraine openly celebrates the legacy of out-and-out fascists such as Bandera, Melnyk and Stukyevich. They were part of a movement that manned two volunteer divisions of the SS and were directly and enthusiastically involved in the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jews.

Eastern Ukraine was torn by a civil war for seven years before the Russian invasion. 14,000 people died in that conflict. And then there is the brutal Ukrainian billionaire class who spent three decades enriching themselves at the expense of the majority of the population. Which set of Ukrainians are we supposed to be defending?

The elites in Washington, London and Berlin know this war is about expanding their power. We need to see that too.

Lie no 6: “Trump has abandoned Europe - we need to stand up and be good Europeans”

The capitalist system is so diseased that it cannot hide its symptoms. Trump is an ugly, psychotic symptom. Nothing more. US imperialism (the military enforcement of US corporate expansion) did not start with Trump’s election.

The US has not abandoned Europe, it is simply pivoting to Asia where it continues to support the genocidal, apartheid regime in Israel and is preparing to launch its offensive against its primary inter-imperialist rival, China.

The European Union is now a military organisation. Ursula Von Der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, is a rabid zionist who has expressed her support for Israel without question. She does not care about the tens of thousands of Palestinians butchered in the Israeli Genocide.

She doesn’t care about the people of Ukraine either. Kaja Kallas, the unelected Estonian EU Representative for Foreign Affairs, is another crazed warmonger who openly provokes Russia and declares that she will spend hundreds of billions of euros so that she can exert EU power in Ukraine.

She and others like her have no qualms whatsoever in sending working class people to die “for Europe”. Liberals might once have said the EEC was set up to prevent war in Europe. Of course that was never true.

It was always a political extension of German and French corporations. Now it is an overtly imperial entity whose methods and aims are as obvious as Trump’s.

Lie no 7 - “We need to be grown up about neutrality”

This is a line that is often spun out by the “soft” left. For example on 4th March former Barnardos CEO and Labour Party hack Fergus Finlay claimed that it was “vanity” for us to remain neutral. That we have to “stand up…join the fight…there is no choice…anything we can contribute to the security and defence of Europe is a contribution to freedom everywhere”.

These are the ravings of a bloodthirsty old fool. “Freedom everywhere”, indeed. The best thing you could have said about the likes of the Labour Party before was they killed the poor slowly with welfare cuts and vulture funds.

If wooly-brained fools like this have their way, our young men and women will be slaughtered before they ever get the chance to be “grown up” about anything, let alone neutrality.