Sabina Higgins Letter to Irish Times calling for ceasefire on Ukraine

Would need to see the letter.

The politico article is all over the shop and sports a headline as clicky batey as one can muster.

Well, she's certainly right about one thing, NATO are pouring tens of billions into a losing battle.

Have you a map that suggests the state of play if the UK and the USA, etc had not provided arms, supplies and intelligence to Ukraine?

The suggestion that NATO/USA would have been better off doing nothing is absolutely comical.

The president and his wife are the 'first citizens' of the country and put there to represent the common man or woman.

She certainly does not represent my views on these matters.

Her ill thought out intervention has already been seized on by the resident Russian ambassador here to support the heinous acts of war his country have inflicted on their neighbouring state.

Very damaging to the presidents office and should be an immediate withdrawal of the letter/ explanation/ apology.

Grounds for resignation if that represents the view from the Aras.

Who the Hollis she speaking on behalf of - definitely not me. Did someone do a survey on what the Irish think about the war in Ukr and she is basing her letter on that. She certainly is not singing to the same tune as the Irish Gov. No matter what she does she cannot once remove herself from being the wife of the president of the Irish state - there is a kind of a conflict of interest involved here. Look at what happened to that senior An Bord Planala employee who’s brother got planning permission for a development . He apparently did not know that the application was from a close relative of his - yet this caused him ‘to walk’. There might be more to this but the principal still stamds

The letter is an affront to Ukraine and to those who are suffering due to Russia's invasion and aggression.

The attempt to both-sides a war of aggression is the worst kind of specious champagne socialism bullshít.

Sabine needs to retract and apologize IMO. The atrocities visited upon Bucha, Hostomel, Irpin, Mariupol and every other Ukrainian town, village and city that Russia has invaded and put under fire.

Russia is the aggressor and Sabine's letter is akin to asking Poland to negotiate with Germany in 1939.

It's an abhorrent stance and is unworthy of the Aras.

She has no mandate to be writing any letters for publishing in an official capacity advocating anything of this nature.

even if the letter didn’t appear on state headed paper.. which we don’t know if it did.. she is obviously identifying as the wife of the president, obviously making a political statement… of which from her or anyone in her position, currently or in the future is not welcome.

You didn’t hear a peep out of Martin McAleese, Nicholas Robinson, on political matters that I can recall

Another decadent western twit happy for another country to be carved up by a dictator.

The idiocy of the self-proclaimed “anti-war” left in all its glory

She has certainly upset all the right people today - all the war-bros and centrist dads are going apeshit.

This is from a report in this week’s New Yorker magazine from Ukraine:

This second phase of the war began the same way the first one ended: with a massacre. On April 8th, while communal graves of murdered civilians were still being excavated near Kyiv, a Russian missile armed with cluster bombs targeted a railway station in Kramatorsk, the provisional seat of Ukrainian-held Donetsk. More than a thousand people were awaiting trains to take them away from the impending offensive in the Donbas. “As soon as I arrived, I saw a little girl lying there with no legs, hugging her Teddy bear,” a police officer who responded to the scene told me, when I visited Kramatorsk this summer. Sixty-one civilians were killed, and about a hundred and twenty were wounded. “There were pieces of people everywhere,” the officer said. “When someone died, we took their tourniquets off and put them on someone else. By the end, my boots were filled with blood.”

Imagine doing a “both sides” on that atrocity. Imagine treating Russian fascist terrorism as the same as the Ukrainians defending themselves. It beggars belief

Michael D is the President not her.

And no matter what the President says, he won't always be speaking for all, there will be those who disagree. As it has always been.

If she has a view she is entitled to express it.

Absolutely you are. Why not write that into the Irish Times.