MATT COOPER CONDEMNS IRISH LEFT THAT SIDES WITH PUTIN

IRELAND has good reason to distrust Russia and to act upon that. It isn’t just the belief that the Russian state has most probably committed attempted murder in Britain – although to do that on the territory of our nearest neighbour is bad enough – but there are serious questions to be asked about the activities of Russian state agents in Ireland.

It is against this background that a Russian diplomat based at that country’s embassy in Rathfarnham, Dublin 14, was yesterday expelled for suspected espionage.

There are good grounds to worry that the Russian state is using Dublin as a base for part of its cybercriminal activities. In addition, it may be washing money through Dublin as part of moneylaundering efforts, or facilitating the oligarchs who remain in favour and who move their stolen money out of Russia.

There is mounting concern that Russian interference in electoral votes not only helped to bring Donald Trump to power in the United States but that it was crucial to Britain’s Brexit vote from the European Union, something that threatens dire consequences for Ireland.

We do not have conclusive evidence of many – or any – of those things, of course. But such evidence is often near impossible to gather – and it would be utterly naive to believe that the Russians are not capable of all of the above and willing to engage in those practices.

Sham

We can see that the country is a sham democracy: anyone who was likely to put up a significant electoral fight against Vladimir Putin was imprisoned or disqualified from doing so and it is likely that the criminal charges given as justification were trumped up.

This is a country that freed from the yoke of oppressive communism has replaced it with crony capitalism for the benefit of Putin’s cronies and to the detriment to the vast majority of cowed citizens. It is a country of widespread abuse of civil liberties, including the murder of many journalists who dare to try to inform the people.

It is also a bully in its region with the people of many neighbouring states living in fear of losing their hard-won independence from the old Soviet Union. Its behaviour against Ukraine – which wants to be a member of the EU, looking west to Europe instead of north and east to rapacious Russia – has been a deliberate disgrace, the occupation of Crimea being the most egregious example.

While it is understandable that the Russians saw the encroachment of Nato further east as a threat to it – and is jealous of the greater economic clout of the European Union and of Ukraine’s moves towards that – that does not excuse or justify its behaviour towards Ukraine. And yet Russia must be delighted that it has a few useful idiots in Ireland coming to its vocal defence as our Government moves to remove one, just one, member of its diplomatic corps.

It is a symbolic gesture, designed to show solidarity with our nearest neighbour, but it has been met with a degree of uproar.

There are a few hard-right loons in that number of course, mostly anonymous and on social media which raises suspicion as to whether they are being paid to peddle propaganda.

Loudest, though, are some from the hard left, who seemingly fail to realise that the Soviet Union they once idolised is no more and that instead it is country that represents all things they are supposed to hate.

Appalled

So they are horrified and appalled – or so they say – by the idea that this country might support our fellow EU members by taking an action to show our disapproval of what Russia is at.

Worse, they treat the EU as being somehow equal with Russia as a force for evil in the world, the EU of which we are part.

Stupidly, some claim that we have put our neutrality at risk, which means they don’t actually understand what neutrality means.

We are militarily neutral, in that we don’t want to be part of an army or fighting force – but that doesn’t mean we can’t take a position on the things of which Russia has been accused, as our Taoiseach did yesterday.

Critics of Varadkar’s move yesterday indulged in the usually ‘whataboutery’. Why didn’t we act when Russia supported President Assad in his deadly chemical weapons attacks against his own people in Syria? Well, if you follow that logic then we are delayed in doing what we should have done, but the reality, if one is to be hard-nosed about it, is that Syria is not our issue. Yesterday, Richard Boyd Barrett raised the question of why we didn’t expel Israeli diplomats in protest against crimes against Palestine.

This is a position with which many will sympathise but by the same token it ignores the fact that Israel gets attacked too. And if there was a reason to expel Israeli diplomats then I’d argue that the time to do so was when Mossad was accused of using fake Irish passports for its operatives to move freely to commit murder.

The truth is that some of these people hate nothing more than the United States, which they regard as the devil incarnate. Yes, the Americans, to put it mildly, don’t have a great track record of international interventions post-Second World War (where they, by winning the war, saved this country from a fate of Nazi rule that our neutrality would not have deterred), but by contrast with Russia (or the old Soviet Union) I know what side I’m happy we’ve been on, and will remain on.

Amid all the nonsense of not taking sides, of being neutral about everything instead of taking a stand for right against wrong, Boyd Barrett and others have been to the forefront of demanding that Ireland not invite President Donald Trump to Ireland.

Pragmatic

I’m not keen on the idea myself – given his contemptible attitudes towards women and migrants and many others – but he does not have a record as a mass murderer. Most of us realise that we have to be pragmatic. The US, even with the obnoxious Trump at the helm, is our friend. Russia doesn’t give a damn about us. Many American companies invest significant sums in Ireland – as our companies do across the Atlantic – and it isn’t just the economic links (tourism and investment) that bind us together. We have blood links.

Millions of our people didn’t emigrate to Russia, did they? They went to Britain or America.

Sensible people, not ideologues, know what side our bread is buttered on.

What Varadkar’s government did yesterday was pragmatic. Our allies are in the EU and they were supporting Britain, not withstanding its imminent departure from the union. We need to be as friendly with Britain as possible for our own selfinterest, with the issues relating to the border on this island still to be resolved entirely to our satisfaction. This is a time to show Britain support out of our own selfish interests, nothing to do with ethics or morality or whatever. That’s how the world works, like it or not.