Defence Forces Dail Éireann — 2022-11-16 ============================================================ Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire The decision of the Putin regime to sanction the Taoiseach and other Ministers is a further worrying sign about what is happening to our reputation as a neutral country. It has implications for our Defence Forces whose safety when deployed on missions is also linked to our reputation as a neutral country. We all condemn Putin's bloody war and the escalation we are seeing at the moment. However, the Government's association with and echoing of the NATO line, abandoning a position of neutrality which should be about upholding opposition to war and military solutions in dangerous conflicts like this, is undermining our neutrality and our international reputation as a neutral country. Ultimately it is endangering the Irish Defence Forces. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2022-11-16/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:51:17+00:00 Sitting date: 2022-11-16