BOLD Robert Emmet, the darling of Erin, will have to wait a while longer for his epitaph to be written.

You will remember that in his speech from the dock before his execution in 1803, Emmet said that his epitaph should not be written until Ireland had taken her place among the nations of the earth.

However, rather than having an independent voice on the world stage through its foreign policy, Ireland is now an anonymous sub-section of what might be termed the Western powers, which include Britain, the EU and the USA.

Ireland’s foreign policy is now made in foreign countries.

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So where, you ask, is the evidence for such a sweeping statement?

There is plenty of it. Last week Micheál Martin visited Ukraine and gave it £106 million to counter what he called Russia’s “war of aggression”.

Since 2022, Ireland has given Ukraine £571m which, according to the statistics agency Statista, has suffered 16,431 civilian casualties in the war.

In roughly the same period, Ireland gave £123m to........

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