THE Communist Party of Ireland has blasted the latest attacks on Irish neutrality by Ireland’s government.

In a statement, the party said the government’s “undemocratic” attack on Irish neutrality has reached “fever pitch.”

“As a neutral country we should be using the European Union presidency to promote peace and dialogue to end conflicts and to encourage the EU to pull back from increasing militarisation.

“In effect, quite the opposite is happening. The Irish EU presidency is barely two months in and it is being fully utilised to undermine and assault our tradition of neutrality that goes back beyond the formation of the Irish state.”

The party accused the EU leadership and the Irish government of working “in tandem to drum up inflation of threats, the new Red Scare, and talk of Ireland as the weak link in EU defence,” and that this had resulted in “new military spending commitments, high-level talks with Britain about joining a North Atlantic naval alliance, and talk of joining an EU-led military mission in Lebanon.”

The statement highlighted what it described as a “media blitz on neutrality” over the last week.

This included reports of the start of high-level talks to have Ireland included in the Joint Expeditionary Force, a 10-nation military alliance led by Britain that harasses Russian commercial shipping in international waters.

The statement insists that “there is no rationale for the Irish government to even entertain participation in this piracy and provocation against a nuclear-armed power.”

The statement also accused the Irish government of colluding with other EU countries to send a military force to Lebanon to replace the UN mission whose mandate expires in December.

“They are talking about sending our working-class sons and daughters off to give their lives in EU and Nato orchestrated missions for the interests of Western imperialism as global conflict ratchets up.”