Coveney accuses Russia of trying to create Irish political dispute with travel ban list

Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney has accused Russia of trying to create a political dispute with its “stop list” of Irish politicians banned from entering its country.

Mr Coveney also said he planned to brief the leaders of Opposition parties in coming days on the current scale of Russia’s presence at its Dublin embassy.

Speaking in Dublin on Friday, Mr Coveney said Russia had deliberately banned some Irish politicians from specific political parties, and opted not to ban others, because it wanted to create a dispute in the State over the composition of the entry bar list. However, Russia was playing “a game” in that regard and people in the State needed to be aware of that.

The 52 Irish politicians banned from travelling to Russia include 33 Fianna Fáil politicians, 16 from Fine Gael, Labour leader Ivana Bacik and Independent Senator Gerard Craughwell, but no Sinn Féin TDs.

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“I think we need to see that for what it is, which is an attempt to unsettle the Irish political system by targeting some people, and not others, and some political parties and not others,” Mr Coveney said. “We shouldn’t be playing that game. The role that Ireland needs to play is to focus on where the real war is taking place, where women and children are being brutalised across Ukraine through the night by rockets sent from Russia.”

The focus should also remain on “calling out” Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, and Ireland would continue to back EU sanctions against the Kremlin. However, the Government was also considering “the appropriate level” of Russia’s “diplomatic presence” at its embassy on Orwell Road, Rathgar, Dublin. Ireland had already asked “members of the Russia embassy team to leave and that has happened”, Mr Coveney said. Any further requests for more of those personnel to leave the country would be discussed with party leaders when he briefed them “in the next week or so”.

“We’ve had an ongoing consideration in terms of the size and scale of Russia’s presence in Ireland at their embassy here,” he said. “They have about 25 people in that embassy at the moment. I take advice from An Garda Síochána, the Defence Forces and various intelligence we have … in terms of diplomats and others who may be here who aren’t involved in diplomatic work. And that’s an ongoing consideration, by the way, it’s not necessarily connected to what we’ve seen this week in terms of the sanctioning of individual politicians in Ireland.”

In March, just after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, four senior officials from the Russian embassy were asked to leave the State because their activities were “not in accordance with the international standards of diplomatic behaviour”.

Irish security sources say the four diplomats were selected because they had previously been identified by the Garda security and intelligence unit as likely being engaged in espionage activities. Specifically, they are suspected to be members of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence unit, and to have used diplomatic cover to carry out intelligence gathering activities. The Government has so far resisted calls for all Russian diplomatic staff to be expelled from the State.

On Friday, Mr Coveney insisted the State still needed to maintain diplomatic channels with countries like Russia and with Iran, which was supplying weapons to the Russians for use against Ukraine.

“We can let countries and governments know when we disagree with them, as well as when we agree with them,” he said of maintaining relations. “That is why we haven’t expelled the Russian ambassador from Dublin. I believe diplomatic channels need to be kept open. Wars like this end because people talk to each other and war needs to be replaced, at some point, by dialogue.”

Mr Coveney made his remarks at Dublin Castle where he was at an international conference endorsing the Declaration on the Protection of Civilians from the Use of Explosive Weapons in Populated Areas. That declaration was agreed at a conference at the United Nations in Geneva in June after a diplomatic process led by the State. It was formally endorsed at the Dublin conference on Friday and seeks to stop the use of explosives in populated areas during conflicts around the world.