Sinn F\u00e9in\u2019s Spokesperson on Foreign Affairs, Se\u00e1n Crowe TD, has strongly criticised US President Barack Obama over his comments that European NATO members need to increase their military spending.<\/p>\n
Obama, speaking during a visit to Europe, in which he met NATO\u2019s Secretary-General, worryingly used the crisis in Ukraine to justify his comments.<\/p>\n
Deputy Se\u00e1n Crowe said:<\/p>\n
\u201cPresident Barack Obama\u2019s comments are very worrying and I totally disagree that NATO members need to be increasing their military spending. In my view NATO is nothing more than a cold war relic that needs to be disbanded.<\/p>\n
\u201cSurely European countries need to increase their spending on social programmes, on job creation programmes, on education, and on healthcare. They certainly don\u2019t need to spend more money on weapons of mass destruction.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe underlying fact is that even though the citizens of many EU member states are being crippled by brutal austerity policies, the collective military spending of EU members states totalled \u20ac194 billion in 2010.<\/p>\n
\u201cSinn F\u00e9in is fully committed to Irish neutrality and firmly opposes the erosion of Irish neutrality by consecutive governments.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are resisting the militarisation of the European Union and any attempts by Irish governments to join military alliances.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn December I moved a Bill in the D\u00e1il which calls for a referendum to insert neutrality into Bunreacht na h\u00c9ireann, the Irish Constitution, to affirm that Ireland is a neutral state, and that the State would have a policy of non-membership of military alliances.<\/p>\n
\u201cI look forward to a robust debate on this issue when the Bill is selected for debate.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
ENDS<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sinn F\u00e9in\u2019s Spokesperson on Foreign Affairs, Se\u00e1n Crowe TD, has strongly criticised US President Barack Obama over his comments that European NATO members need to increase their military spending. Obama, speaking during a visit to Europe, in which he met NATO\u2019s Secretary-General, worryingly used the crisis in Ukraine to justify his comments. Deputy Se\u00e1n Crowe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,112,79,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-eu","category-nato","category-neutrality","category-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1673"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1673\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1674,"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1673\/revisions\/1674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}