Harney clarifies 'anti-Americanism' remarks

IRELAND: The Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise Trade and Employment, Ms Harney, has said her views on anti-Americanism in the debate on the Iraqi crisis have been misrepresented.

Speaking at the opening of an enterprise centre in Coolock, north Co Dublin, yesterday, she said she had not claimed the 100,000 marchers in the recent anti-war protest in Dublin were anti-American, or that left-wing elements had infected their minds.

Expanding on remarks she first made last Friday, Ms Harney said there were people involved in the anti-war movement who had a blatantly separate agenda, who were anti-American and anti-EU and who had demonstrated this by their anti-Nice Treaty stance in recent times. These people had a separate agenda to those genuinely concerned about the prospect of war. "Everybody is anti-war, I am anti-war," she said.

But Ms Harney criticised "those who insisted there should be no military involvement without another UN resolution, and who would then argue that if there is another UN resolution in favour of military action, that we should reject it". It was, she said, an approach that made nonsense of the UN and suggested that some people were prepared only to go along with UN resolutions as long as the resolutions were supportive of their own position.

"You cannot take à la carte approach to the UN," she said.

People of extreme left-wing opinion who had also been opposed to the Nice Treaty were using the current debate to progress other agendas, she said. Specifically she criticised Mr Trevor Sargent, of the Green Party, for what she said was his inability to "bring himself to condemn attacks on the American aeroplane in Shannon".

Ms Harney added that one of the organisers of the anti-war campaign, "Mr Boyd Barrett, is another example. People who have other motives should spell out what other motives are and not try and confuse different things."

In a letter in today's Irish Times, Ms Harney says the comments she made last Friday were misrepresented, and she repeats that she "did not state 100,000 marchers in Dublin were anti-American or that the left had infected their minds".

In the course of the letter Ms Harney says "the extreme left in Ireland has always been virulently anti-American and anti-EU. And they want their ideas to infect more of the centre ground."

She adds that "reasonable people accept that there is a difference between criticising the policies of a foreign government and being hostile to what that country fundamentally stands for".

"I put the majority of the 100,000 demonstrators in the first category and a lot of the left-wing in the second."

Ms Harney attributed the misrepresentation of her views to "a misleading description of what I said, put out by the Labour Party and others", as well as an editorial carried in The Irish Times yesterday. However, she described the newspaper's report of her comments as an "accurate, professional report".