Ukraine War
Dail Éireann — 2026-03-24
============================================================

Micheál Martin (FF), Cork South-Central

Deputies Boyd Barrett, Murphy and others will never acknowledge that point. President Zelenskyy executed nobody before Ukraine was invaded. I believe in dialogue. I believe in the international rules-based order and a UN mandate, although the UN is paralysed. The reason we are doing the triple lock is the UN Security Council is paralysed. It is going to be very hard to get a peacekeeping mission going and because of the Security Council, UNIFIL will end at the end of this year. The opportunities for Irish peacekeepers, which is something we have been doing uninterrupted since 1958, is very much in the balance, but no one seems to care about that on the Opposition side in terms of our future role in peacekeeping.
Cuba should be resolved by dialogue. It is another regime that has a certain glorified narrative around it here but it has been quite a repressive regime as well and it has oppressed its people for far too long. It needs to get with it in the modern era and engage in a sensible dialogue to try to get a resolution. It does not need any external interventions. I have been to Cuba. When I was the Minister for Foreign Affairs, I was one of two or three European ministers in the 2007 to 2010 period who visited Cuba in the hope of getting a more liberal view of things, but, even then, it did not release the political prisoners that we had sought the release of. President Castro and his brother, who was his successor, ruled with an iron fist. That was wrong and the consequences for its citizens have been fairly dire. Hence many left and went to the United States or elsewhere. No one case is simple. There is a complexity and history to a lot of these issues that defies simplistic sloganeering. I dealt with the questions about the triple lock and UN mandate. I dealt with Deputy Whitmore's question. That is our take on it and we will examine it.
In response to Deputy O'Hara's question about the ETB-----

---

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/2026-03-24/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:03+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-03-24