Dr. Edward Horgan:

I thank the committee for giving us the opportunity to make this presentation. As legislators, members play a vital role in ensuring public service oversight and accountability. While, in so far as we know, nobody has been killed or tortured at Shannon Airport, hundreds of thousands have been killed and tortured in middle eastern wars. Successive Irish Governments have been complicit in these crimes. An Iraqi child killed in a US air attack or an Afghan resistance fighter tortured at Bagram airfield are just as important as an Irish child or soldier. The thousands of Afghan and Iraqi dead children are just as important as the 796 children buried in Tuam. At the apparent behest of the Government, gardaí at Shannon have consistently refused to investigate these issues.

We are a group of peace activists trying to ensure compliance with Irish and international laws. I am a former Army officer and a former United Nations military peacekeeper. I lecture part time in politics and international relations at the University of Limerick. As a civilian, I have been promoting democracy and the rule of law in post-conflict countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Balkans and the former Soviet Union. I am accompanied by Ms Margaretta D'Arcy who is a committed peace activist and a member of Aosdána. She is a founding member of the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp set up in the 1970s to protest against cruise missiles which members may be aware were armed at the time with nuclear warheads.

The cruise missiles at the time were armed with nuclear warheads. In the meantime, the nuclear warheads had been replaced by what are called sub-nuclear warheads. Coincidentally, we are now aware that in June 1999 two airplane loads of these cruise missiles passed through Ireland, probably through Shannon Airport. At the time, cruise missiles were being used to bomb the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade and the television station.
Dr. Margaretta D'Arcy is a writer and dramatist and she uses dramatic actions to expose what is happening at Shannon Airport. Dr. John Lannon is a human rights activist of long standing with Amnesty International and other non-governmental organisations, NGOs. He is a full-time lecturer at the Kemmy Business School at the University of Limerick, is a founding member of Shannonwatch and has produced the booklet on the legal aspects of what is happening at Shannon Airport.
Today we wish to present to the committee what is happening at Shannon Airport and the significance of these events, in the expectation that the committee will take appropriate actions to investigate and achieve some accountability for what has transpired. The details of our presentation are contained in our written submission, which has been circulated to the members. In our verbal submission we will highlight the key issues. I will focus on neutrality, Ms Margaretta D'Arcy will speak on the failures to inspect or investigate what has been happening at Shannon Airport and on the probability that Ireland has facilitated operations by US special forces, including the US drone programme, and Dr. John Lannon will explain the scale and scope of the US torture rendition programme and the extent to which successive Irish Governments have been directly complicit in this programme, in contravention of the UN Convention against torture and the Irish Criminal Justice (UN Convention Against Torture) Act 2000. He will also sum up our presentation and outline what recommendations we would like the committee to undertake.
Neutrality is not just a piece of legal terminology. For small states such as Ireland it is an important concept of international law that enables us to avoid being dragged into unjustified wars and also to promote genuine, altruistic foreign policies that promote international peace. The broadest definition of neutrality comes from international law experts Oppenheim-Lauterpacht, who state that any state that is not a belligerent in a war is considered to be a neutral state and is therefore bound by international laws and rules of neutrality. Some states declare themselves to be neutral states either by writing it into their constitutions or having neutrality as their declared policy. The US was a neutral state for the initial stages of both the First World War and the Second World War. Switzerland, Austria and Finland have neutrality written into their constitutions and Sweden, Malta and Ireland have neutrality as their declared national policy. All Irish Governments have pursued a policy of neutrality since 1939 and this has been strongly supported by the Irish people, as was demonstrated in 2013 in a Peace and Neutrality Alliance-commissioned Red C poll which found that 78% of the Irish people believed that Ireland should have a policy of neutrality.
There are several misconceptions about the rules of neutrality. Ireland sending weather forecasts to England during World War II was not in fact a breach of Irish neutrality. However, one of the most basic rules, from Ireland's point of view, is Article 2 of the Hague Convention V on neutrality, which states: "Belligerents are forbidden to move troops or convoys of either munitions of war or supplies across the territory of a neutral Power". Therefore, a country such as the United States, at war in Afghanistan and Iraq, is not supposed to move troops through Ireland. A clear example of the failure of Irish legislators to curtail abuse of authority by the Irish Government occurred on 20 March 2003, when Dáil Éireann approved a Government motion that, in effect, claimed to state that US military use of Shannon Airport did not amount to “participation” in the US-led invasion of Iraq. The motion stated that Dáil Éireann "endorses the decision of the Government that Ireland will not participate in the coalition's proposed military action against Iraq;" and "recalls the long-standing arrangements for the overflight and landing in Ireland of US military and civilian aircraft; and supports the decision of the Government to maintain those arrangements".
These statements are incompatible and are an attempt to say that black is white and that participation is not participation. This was clearly identified by Judge Nicholas Kearns in the High Court case Horgan v. Ireland in April 2003, just a month after the Dáil motion, when he ruled that: "The court is prepared to hold therefore that there is an identifiable rule of customary law in relation to the status of neutrality whereunder a neutral state may not permit the movement of large numbers of troops or munitions of one belligerent State through its territory en route to a theatre of war with another". I was the Horgan in that case.
The members of this Oireachtas committee, in their role as legislators, have a very important role in ensuring that the Irish Government complies with the basic rules of international law. It is not just a few dozen troops that have passed through Shannon Airport. A total of 2.5 million armed US troops, huge amounts of munitions and other material have passed through Shannon Airport since 2001.
There are very grave matters of human rights involved in Ireland participating in unjustified wars and being complicit in breaches of the UN Convention against torture. There are also positive things we should be doing in matters of international relations that are being neglected or damaged by our participation and complicity in wars. Ireland’s very beneficial role and its credibility in promoting international peace and justice are being severely damaged. In the long term, it is important that neutrality should be written into the Irish Constitution. In the short term, steps should be taken by this committee and Dáil Éireann to end the Irish Government's abuses of international and Irish laws, and this should entail immediately ending US military use of Shannon Airport. If there is some legal technicality whereby the Garda cannot search US military aircraft, no US military aircraft should be allowed to land at Irish airports.
As we meet today, civil war is spreading across Iraq. The roots of this civil war were sewn on 20 March 2003 with the US led invasion of Iraq, just as Irish legislators were passing a motion in the Dáil that Irish participation in this Iraq war was not participation. Dr. John Lannon will explain some problems we have encountered with the Office of the Attorney General with regard to gardaí failing to search and investigate US military aircraft at Shannon Airport. We have also experienced some difficulty in recent times with the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission, GSOC, which has failed to investigate properly virtually all the complaints by peace activists to that office about Garda misbehaviour at Shannon Airport. In recent weeks, also, we have encountered indications that the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions might have been failing in its duty to act independently in matters relating to the prosecution of peace activists at Shannon Airport. All of these are serious matters that this committee should examine.