THE PRESIDENT'S SPEECH.

The President of Ireland Michael  D. Higgins recently made a powerful speech in which he laid bare the central problem of our world at war and the central reason why the United Nations is a large part of our problem with no  desire to be anything else.

President Higgins said that: " The five permanent members ( of the United Nations security council )   China, France, Russia, the UK and the USA, are embarking on a ' new arms race' and  the arms industry was exporting  'weapons of death and destruction' for use in Syria, Yemen, and the Democratic Republic of Congo".

President Higgins  is one of the few international figures who have the courage and the desire to make  such a statement and talk about the consequences. .

The United Nations organisation is based upon the principle of arming the  most militarily powerful and wealthy nations and giving them the responsibility to keep world peace!

This  is a sure recipe for war - not occasional war  but permanent war for profit. In the least violent  of times we may hope these five best armed and wealthiest nations - whose leaders are becoming every year more unstable - will agree enough  among themselves to enforce stability - not create peace but enforce stability -  on the rest of the world with the help of the armies of the smaller countries like Ireland.  If the five fall out among themselves then the stage is set for the most appalling of all the United Nations  principles to come into full action - the principle of "you get peace by threatening to beat down the rest of the world", the rest being  chosen for this fate by the United Nations and its highest  paying members. At present the USA and China are threatening each other with  a trade war which could turn into something much worse.

This principle  and our  acceptance of it is one of the worst of the deceptions played by the United Nations on a world that was so hopeful for peace that it accepted the United Nations as a peacemaker. The UN was not and is not a peace maker, it is  a facilitator and stabiliser of war between factions  and nations competing in our permanent wars  for profit.

President Higgins pointed out that " these five members of the Permanent Security  Council of the United Nations who are entrusted with the maintenance of international peace and security  account for three quarters of global arms exports".

He might have coloured this picture of evil with a homely illustration - if you produce eggs you will encourage  the whole world to get healthy by eating eggs. For the arms makers every war is a welcome opportunity to demonstrate the latest and freshest in their range of deadly eggs. Every war stimulates their trade and if there is a lull in their permanent wars, they  make new ones. The five "peace-keepers" of the United Nations cannot do without arms sales on a massive and ever increasing scale to feed  their economies. For them death solves problems, their economic problems.

It all may seem far away as we read what President Higgins or any other analyst says so let's bring it nearer  to home. When we were in the last stages of ending the thirty years  war in Ireland's northeast a few years ago a conference was held in  Washington to discuss our future. Imagine the scene, tired people hoping to make peace, waiting for encouragement and help from the leaders of the world. In this conference held in the  premises of one of the UN Security Council, there were plenty of  speeches about peace. So what did the speech-makers say to us in this atmosphere of hope?

There was one speech I shall never forget .

We were emerging from a thirty years war . We had worked and  hoped for peace not only for ourselves but  for the world. In the midst of the various clichés, a speaker  took to  the platform - I think he was from the now deceased Northern Ireland Office -  to tell us how we could best make progress in our future peace.

The best thing, he told us ,  was to encourage industry.   And the best industry to encourage, he said, was the Belfast-based firm making arms for export,  which he said had excellent prospects..................excellent prospects   ..... ......for peace ?

After a thirty years war......................?

From the audience of politicians, social workers,  clergy and many others present  there were only two people who cried out and protested  with  dismay and indignation. One of them was Inez Mc Cormack, a fearless trade union  leader who demanded what the workers wanted, not  what the war-for-profit merchants wanted.  

From the army of professional peacemakers about to leave the meeting for a meal  not another word was said about our peace.

 For some reason we go on  believing  in this  United Nations fiction.

What a recipe for peace it is, " Your best way to proceed in your peace is to manufacture arms to encourage others to make war ".

President Higgins in his speech also said ; " The self- defeating rhetoric of the arms race, the immorality of the arms trade, can only serve  as infrastructure to fuel current and future wars" .

We might think that such a speech in this  time of  Wars-For-Policy-and-Profit would encourage most Irish people to bring Michael D. Higgins into Presidency for a second term. Unfortunately it may do nothing of the sort.  We may  have bought into the United Nations and arms trade untruth  that peace means preserving for the few the ability to beat down the rest us. For profit.