Pádraig Mac Lochlainn (Donegal North East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I have some final questions, and Senator Ó Clochartaigh wants to put a final question also. In the third paragraph of the correspondence from December of 2013 the Private Secretary, writing on behalf of the Minister, states:

The Air Navigation (Foreign Military Aircraft) Order 1952 gives the Minister for Foreign Affairs primary responsibility for the regulation of activity by foreign military aircraft in Ireland. Permission to land at Irish airports is subject to the condition that the aircraft are unarmed, carry no arms, ammunition or explosives, do not engage in intelligence gathering, and that the flights in question do not form any part of military exercises or operations.

That is clear and gives the impression that we have a rock solid approach. He went on to refer to 50,000 troops in 2013, the fact that there is the exemption and the prior approval but the presentation of the Government's approach in these sets of correspondence is not frank in terms of the scale of this. One could come to the conclusion reading the correspondence that we do not allow any arms or ammunition to pass through. A layperson reading it could reach the conclusion that we have a policy that these flights coming through must not carry arms or explosives. However, we have established from our visit to Shannon and from Mr. Burgess's evidence today that huge numbers, and that is accepted, of men and women of the United States forces, marines and so on, came through the airport with weapons on board planes with the permission of the Irish Government over an extended period while en routeto a theatre of war. In terms of one of those theatres of war, the war in Iraq, it was not endorsed by the United Nations Security Council. The war in Afghanistan was endorsed by the UN Security Council but the war in Iraq was not. If Mr. Burgess was looking at the objective of the 1952 order to which he referred, it must be undermined by the fact that the actual practice, certainly in the past decade, has been to allow huge amounts of weaponry to come through. Mr. Burgess might deal with that question first.