THE FORMER US ambassador to the UN will hijack a poetry evening in Dublin for a pro-war tirade this Remembrance Sunday.

Samantha Power will deliver the TS Eliot lecture — launched last year with poet Paul Muldoon as the inaugural speaker — at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre on November 12.

Peace campaigners We Save Syria and the Communist Party of Ireland (CPI) alerted the Morning Star to the supposed celebration of literature.

The evening will be introduced by attention-seeking 1980s pop-flop Bob Geldof.

Dublin-born Ms Power’s lecture will follow an interview with journalist Fintan O’Toole.

In an opinion piece for the Irish Times in April, Mr O’Toole called US President Donald Trump’s cruise missile attack on Syria a “case of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.”

We Save Syria head Dr Declan Hayes told the Star the trio “have to be regarded as peddlers of war, not as journeymen minstrels of peace.”

The events page on the theatre’s website initially lauded Ms Power as: “The public face of US opposition to Russian aggression in Ukraine and Syria, negotiated the toughest sanctions in a generation against North Korea.”

Dr Hayes said: “That puts this night in the interests of the American war industry, not in the cultural interests of Ireland.”

But earlier this week the page was edited to remove the paragraph referring to her warmongering activities.

CPI general secretary Eugene McCartan said that was after a party member contacted the theatre about the event.

“The Abbey Theatre now says that they let the venue to a separate promotion company for this event,” he said — although the identity of the organisers remained a mystery.

Dr Hayes said the theatre originally claimed to be co-hosting the event.

“I would imagine the US embassy entered the scene early on and used these lectures for what the US believes the arts should be used for — US wars of imperialist aggression.”

Dr Hayes said the timing of the event on Remembrance Sunday “has to be considered part of the process of softening up Ireland for more collusion with the US’s imperialist wars and to colonise Ireland’s cultural hubs in the process.”