Paul Crewe

So true Eoin.. you mention NGO’s- it’s just criminal that there are 34,000 of these organisations that don’t create employment but yet get €6.2Billion of hard earned Irish taxpayers money every year and this is of course to the detriment of self-employed people and businesses

An unarmed Iranian ship was invited, along with the U.S., to be part of an Indian Naval exercise, and its sailors paraded on land before the president. The U.S. at the last minute pulled out of the exercise and instead attacked the Iranian ship with a torpedo. Breaking with all norms of civilization and warfare, we then refused to rescue the drowning survivors. The Sri Lanka Navy was left to pull the dead bodies from the water. I am hard pressed to think of any other nation throughout history that would do something so cowardly and despicable. We are genuinely in a league of our own, and American media — mostly shrugging off the bombing of a girls school and acting as if carpet bombing Tehran is a normal military tactic — is deeply complicit.

It was a very long time ago so I’m not 100% sure what my view was then. But I think the issue is that Hamilton wrapped himself in the Union flag yet didn’t pay taxes here (and hasn’t done for most of his career as he left Britain when he was 22). Ratcliffe, on the other hand, built up a business over many years in the UK, creating jobs and paying huge sums in tax for many years. He didn’t leave Britain until his late 60s. And he doesn’t wrap himself in the union flag or get treated as a great British hero. So all a rather different scenario, don’t you think?

I think it’s clear we need to radically increase our defensive capabilities. We can do this and debate this without going down the rabbit holes of neutrality, the military industrial complex or western imperialism. The security of our people and our economy matters.

The Triple Lock dates to the 1960 Defence Act (not Nice II), ensuring that Irish defence forces would only be deployed overseas on UN mandated peacekeeping missions. The UN was under pressure then too, and the Cold War was raging, but our leaders had some courage.

Yes, this is a good move. We need to trust those we have elected to run our country instead of looking for validation from China, Russia or the USA.

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Ireland under Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil is now a country neutral on the question of if colonialism is bad.