Michael Lavalette speaks to former Irish MEP, Clare Daly about her political history, her view on the current situation and her forthcoming general election campaign

People in Britain particularly know you for your barnstorming speeches at the European Parliament. But could you tell us a little about your longer political history and back story?

I became politically active in the 1980s, a fairly bleak time in Ireland. It was the time of the anti-apartheid movement and there were many issues of social justice and women’s rights that I got involved with.

I became the President of my students’ union whilst at Dublin City University and was involved in many campaigns affecting students, young people and workers.

When I left university, I went to work at Dublin airport and became a shop steward in my union (Services, Industrial, Professional and Technical Union [SIPTU]). As a union activist, I was involved in the fight against low pay and for better working conditions.

Alongside my union work, I was involved in community politics. I was active in the campaigns against water charges and the Bin Tax as the Irish Government tried to make ordinary working people pay for their crisis. In the midst of the campaign against the Bin Tax, in 2003, I was imprisoned for a month for breaching a High Court order preventing protests against council attempts to enforce bin charges.

In terms of electoral politics, I was elected as a councillor in Fingal County, Dublin in 1999, re-elected in both 2004 and 2009. I stood in elections for the Dail in 2007 and 2009 and got elected for the first time in 2011, and re-elected in 2016. In 2019, I stood in the European Elections where I was elected for the Dublin constituency.

Ironically, I never envisaged being an elected politician, it wasn’t something I set out to do. But I’ve always seen any elected position as offering a platform to raise important issues and to use the elected position as a place from which to organise and to help build our movements for change.

You are a vociferous opponent of war in Ukraine. Can you tell us a little about what you think is going on and where the war is heading?

The war in Ukraine is incredibly dangerous for the world. You have Zelenskyy fighting his internal war, his (increasingly unhinged) demands for more and more weapons and money from his Western and Nato backers to push the war deeper into Russia and, of course the cost of the Russian invasion.

The cost to ordinary people in the region has been huge. There have been countless lives lost and families destroyed. The cost to the Ukrainian economy has been dramatic. And all for what?

I suspect Zelenskyy is becoming increasingly isolated from his Western backers who are becoming irked by his never-ending demands for more and more support for his war drive and concerned about his unhinged threats that he might use nuclear weapons. The pumping of massive amounts of weapons and resources into a senseless war can’t continue.

The outcome will be, has to be, some form of negotiated settlement and stepping back from the madness of war.

You have consistently spoken out about Palestinian rights. Can you tell us a little about why the genocide in Gaza is happening, who is responsible and what we need to do?

We have had a full year of a live-streamed, self-declared genocide in Gaza. This is only happening because the colonial entity that is Israel has been enabled, supported and armed by its US, European and Western backers. Without their backing, the genocide would be over, without them, it never would have started.

It seems to me that the Western powers have decided to let Israel off the leash as a test to see how far they can push the bonfiring of international law and all semblance of humanity – and we can see this spiralling with the situation in Lebanon.

The key task for us – the vast majority of the people the world over who are appalled at what Israel is doing – is to isolate Israel in the same manner as apartheid South Africa was. We need a bottom up BDS campaign to stop arming and to isolate genocidal Israel.

You are going to stand in the next Irish elections. What are the prospects for the left and for left realignment (in Ireland and more generally)?

I have decided to throw my hat in the ring and stand in the General Election. It’s a bit of a wild card entry as I’m standing in a constituency I’ve never represented before, so it is a bit of a shot in the dark and I have no idea what my prospects are, but we will give it a go!

I felt it was important to stand, especially given the way our government is undermining our traditional position of neutrality and bringing us closer and closer into European military alliances. This is not something that the people of Ireland support.

But the political establishment in Ireland have given up on the opportunity that we could have had to be a beacon of solidarity with the global south and to be uniquely placed, given our history, to be an active campaigning voice for peace and anti-colonialism.

More generally, in Ireland, as in much of Europe, the left is too disunited and lost some focus – and this has created a space that has allowed the far-right to move into.

We need an activist left that has got peace and anti-imperialism at its heart, that speaks out against war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza and that looks to grow its numbers from strong pro-Palestine and anti-war movements that have been so significant over recent years.

From this month’s Counterfire freesheet