Departmental Strategies Dail Éireann — 2025-03-04 ============================================================ Ruth Coppinger (PBP), Dublin West Militaristic policy. It is proposed that Ireland's budget for military spending will eventually increase from €1.3 billion to €3 billion. The decision to drop the triple lock is coming at the expense of people on lower incomes, education, disability, housing, refuges for domestic violence, etc. Earlier, the Taoiseach bemoaned that we are living in a world that is becoming increasingly brutal, militaristic, violent and nakedly imperialistic. In that context, I ask the Taoiseach once again - this is our last chance - if he still intends to visit and greet Donald Trump, the chief proponent of this direction of the world right now, on St. Patrick's Day, thereby giving him a photo opportunity. This is a public bully who humiliated Zelenskyy, as we saw, over the weekend. He is a chauvinist. He has just freed two rapists. --- 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/2025-03-04/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:53:34+00:00 Sitting date: 2025-03-04