Listen for a moment and you may detect an odd undercurrent in the domestic conversation about Donald Trump’s America or Ukraine or Gaza or Venezuela or the rest of the benighted world. The message is that such matters are of little import to us. Well, what with them being so far away and barely identifiable on a map, surely only people with notions about themselves care to comment about such lofty matters. Only people with an elevated sense of their own place in the world imagine that anyone relevant is listening. And haven’t we enough to be worrying about at home?
It’s partly true. No one of sound mind believes that Trump is studying their appeals to reason, however well-crafted. (Their best bet is to cadge a slot on Fox News but since that may require the Maga imprimatur, it rules out the saner 90 per cent of the population.)
No commentator believes that Vladimir Putin is listening to them either. The only thing he fears is news of ample sophisticated weapons deals for Ukraine. Anything that might help it defend itself against being bombed to destruction or having its people frozen to death in minus 20 conditions, or watching Russian drones and missiles strike its maternity hospitals, apartment blocks or its exhausted miners travelling home from work. Or the agony of having tens of thousands of its children abducted and acculturated to the Putin ideal.
No commentator on earth will persuade Putin to stop. But what they can do is keep the conversation alive in their own countries, remind people of the stakes and set ongoing events in a domestic context.
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Most are aware, for instance, of the failed EU attempts to agree a €210 billion reparations loan – sourced from Russian assets – to cover Ukraine’s financial needs up to 2030. When a proposal to loan the country €90 billion instead was debated last week in the Dáil, Sinn Féin’s Pearse Doherty summed up the party’s objections in a post: “At a time when people are being crushed by the cost of living, and after a budget that left ordinary workers behind, this Government wants Ireland and the EU to commit billions to Ukraine to weapons of war”. That money would be far better invested in public services and improving people’s lives, he told the Dáil, not in escalating war or undermining Irish neutrality.
From a purely selfish viewpoint, Sinn Féin leaders are smart enough to know that Putin’s threats do not end at Ukrainian borders. He has already expanded the battlefield into the daily lives of our EU allies and friends, with his cyber wars on democratic elections, critical infrastructure sabotage and drone sightings forcing temporary closures of major airports in Copenhagen, Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Brussels, Liège, Oslo, Riga and Gothenburg in what is increasingly viewed as part of a broader pattern of hostile activity. Doherty’s “choice” between domestic budget allocations and aid to desperate Ukrainians who are also defending Europeans borders is disingenuous, to put it charitably.
Since the 2022 Russian invasion, Sinn Féin has dialled up the rhetoric from a hopeful “using the Minsk agreements as a means to pursue dialogue” (SF foreign affairs spokesman Johnny Brady in a Dáil debate on February 23rd, 2022 in the presence of the Ukraine ambassador), to “a naked act of aggression against the sovereign State of Ukraine ... Russia is giving vent to its leader’s imperialist ambitions in the region” (Brady on the party website that same week).
Party leader Mary Lou McDonald, three years later in the Dáil, again in the presence of the Ukraine ambassador, talked about Russia’s “brutal criminal invasion of Ukraine” and “violation of international law”. Putin’s invasion, she said, continues to be an attack on Ukraine’s right to self-determination, sovereignty and peace.
[ ‘Human safari’: In Kherson, Ukraine, to step outside is to risk death by droneOpens in new window ]
So apart from Sinn Féin’s well-developed distaste for weapons of war and commendable wish to supply heating assistance to Ukrainians, what else does the party have to offer that brutalised people? Are nonsensical comparisons to Irish people struggling with the cost of living the extent of it? Where is the practical advice or help for a sovereign state trapped in a full-scale war, fighting to defend itself from a psychopathic aggressor that has plenty of western friends in very high places both east and west of this island?
What does Sinn Féin think is going to happen if Putin continues to demand, as a peace condition, all of Donbas, on top of the already annexed Crimean peninsula at the very least – an area that once contained about 15 per cent of the population and significant national industrial capacity? Does that ring any bells? How must it feel to be Estonia or Poland?
Almost four years into the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the same blind faith persists that our neutrality will have a role to play in persuading Putin to respond to diplomacy, unsupported by evidence, current context or constructive suggestion. The inference is that the party’s loathing of military weaponry is unique to it and its ultra-humane sensitivities, while everyone who reflects or hesitates must be slavering to lash public funds on arms dealers and to dispatch our children to foreign battlefields.
To invert Doherty’s question: find me a sane citizen of any country who would not want to see State funds used for military weapons if it was for their own or others’ defence? War is failure but also an inevitability where psychopathic imperialists are enabled to act out their fantasies.
Four years into the invasion of Ukraine, it should be obvious that a bloody campaign of annihilation designed to obliterate a country’s existence, history and culture is not a simple no-to-military-weapons, yes-to-public-services issue. Shame on those who pretend that it is.
