Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions Dail Éireann — 2026-01-20 ============================================================ Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire Will the Taoiseach and his European colleagues stop soft-pedalling or, worse, bending the knee before Donald Trump, and finally admit what everybody can see and what some of us have been saying for some time, which is that Trump is a bully, an imperialist, and a threat to the world and to humanity? Will they admit that it is time to stand up to this bully and call him out for what he is? His list of crimes, threats and bullying is too long to enumerate but let us give some of the highlights. He armed a genocide. He gave billions to Israel to carry out a genocide over two years, then invited Netanyahu, an indicted war criminal, to a New Year's Eve party in his mansion in Mar-a-Lago. The Taoiseach mentioned Putin and what a threat he is. Trump has now put Putin, an indicted war criminal, on the Board of Peace for Gaza, along with Blair, one of the major architects of the Iraq War, which claimed the lives of 1 million people, and, of course, Netanyahu and Israel, the people who perpetrated the genocide, will be on the Board of Peace as well. He has attacked Venezuela and kidnapped the President and his wife. Whatever the Taoiseach thinks about that regime, and I do not think much of it, he has no right to attack that regime. Trump has defended the execution of a 36-year-old mother and writer, Renée Good, by ICE agents, and has sent paramilitary forces into the cities of America to attack people of colour and immigrants. He has threatened Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, Canada and Iran. He pretended he was interested in Ukraine because of the warmongering of Putin, which clearly is not true but actually exposed that what he wanted was the rare earth minerals from Ukraine. He is threatening an economic war and trade war that is driving up the cost of living for working class people in America and threatens to do the same to hard-pressed working class people across the world. To add to it all, his pal is Elon Musk, who profits from selling child abuse material and misogynistic material on the Internet. The disgusting list goes on. He admits that his strategy is imperialist in the national security strategy, which states that the US "will assert political, economic and military power over the Western Hemisphere." He quotes the Monroe Doctrine, which was used to justify interventions in Nicaragua, Bolivia, Panama, Ecuador, and in Iran and Iraq in the 1950s. The Taoiseach can go through the list. Will the Taoiseach stand up to the bully? He is not seriously going to go to the White House with shamrock this year and celebrate our national day with them. Surely he is going to tell US troops to get out of Shannon Airport and he is not going to go along with the militarisation agenda that Trump is urging on Europe. --- 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/2026-01-20/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:31+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-01-20