Dr. Karen Devine:

I repeat that there is a very clear legal concept of neutrality. States do not get to make up what they think neutrality is. It is a legal concept that is enshrined in the Hague Convention. The manner in which states have actually put it into practice has generally accorded with these international laws. If the behaviour of a state did not accord with international law, the concept would lose its significance and there would be no point in having an international law on neutrality. International laws are in place to regulate the behaviour of states and set expectations regarding their behaviour, particularly in matters of war and peace that are so vital.

The question of whether neutrality should be enshrined in the Constitution is an interesting one. I wrote a paper published in Irish Political Studies, which was published in 2009. I have e-mailed six or seven of my articles to the members of the joint committee. In my 2009 article I looked at the positions of Irish political parties on neutrality and European Security and Defence Policy in successive decades from the 1960s through to the 2000s. One of the things that struck me was how the political parties had moved across a matrix from being in favour of and supporting active neutrality - the legal concept of neutrality and the normative values about what I have spoken - towards a maximalist EU defence policy involving signing up to the mutual defence clause, which is what we did when we ratified the Lisbon treaty. Interestingly, I found that as the decades progressed, the Labour Party which had stated neutrality should be enshrined in the Constitution and made a number of interventions in the Houses of the Oireachtas to propose a Bill to that end had joined Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil in leaving real, active or positive neutrality aside and moving to the minimalist concept of not being a member of a military alliance. The Labour Party knew that it would eventually agree to maximalist EU defence. The mantle then transferred from the Labour Party to the Green Party. In the 1990s the Green Party stated we should have neutrality enshrined in the Constitution. When it formed a coalition with Fianna Fáil, it changed its stance on neutrality and went the way of the Labour Party. I concluded that in the 2000s Sinn Féin had adopted the idea of including neutrality in the Constitution. It is interesting how the idea of including it in the Constitution has been transferred over the decades through the political parties.

The Government is not in favour of holding a referendum on this issue because it would then be constrained by international law on neutrality. In other words, if neutrality were to be enshrined in the Constitution, Edward Horgan would have won his case because the judge would have found that the Government had violated the constitutional provisions on neutrality. As I have said, neutrality is clearly defined in the Hague Conventions. It is a legal concept. There is no fuzziness about what it requires. There is a debate around it because many of the political parties - certainly, the mainstream political parties and the parties of the right - want all member states of the European Union to eventually become member states of NATO, to be involved in collective defence arrangements and to sign up to mutual defence clauses. That is why it is claimed that the concept of neutrality is somehow fuzzy. As I have argued, it is not. Saying it is fuzzy is a political device or strategy used by the Government to continue to do what it wants to do. In the case we are discussing it wants to facilitate US warplanes landing at Shannon Airport en route to a theatre of war.