Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I still have a number of questions as I refer to the document but perhaps I am bouncing the Minister of State into it. I think I bounced myself into it last night when I started reading it. I want to talk about the implementation of the EU maritime security strategy action plan. Have we signed up to that, which dates from 2014? If we have, were we concerned when for instance in its report on MARSUR the European Commission's joint staff working document on the implementation of the EU maritime security strategy action plan says that:

[T]he MARSUR Networking community is preparing to expand to additional Member States [and that is literally what we are speaking about now] and entities such as the EU Satellite Centre and is exploring options to integrate valuable surveillance information from different Maritime Security Regimes reaching beyond the boundaries of the European Union.

That it is reaching beyond the boundaries of the European Union is the aspect I am interested in given that throughout the document it speaks of co-operation with other nation states. In one place the document discusses increased co-operation with north African countries, in particular with a view to improving the safety of navigation in the Mediterranean. These are laudable aims but they are beyond the bounds of the European Union and they have not been discussed, to my knowledge, in the Dáil or in this committee.

When people signed up, through the referendum, to the European Defence Agency there was a presumption - perhaps wrongly by most people and I know I tried to highlight what the European Defence Agency was talking about at the time - that it was going to increase capacity and increase interoperability and not just within the European Union but beyond. The Commission's working document on the implementation of the EU maritime security strategy action plan says that co-operation with NATO remains a priority for member states with "The need to promote closer cooperation with NATO on standards and procedures". There is continuous emphasis on NATO in what is supposed to be an EU document on maritime security. It also says that MARSUR is the defence layer of the common information sharing environment. Therefore, this is not about just sharing information for the sake of maritime protection, it is regarded as a defence mechanism.

The document also speaks about how "At international level, relevance is given to the work developed under NATO and to its High Level Committee of Emergency Civil Planning, to the NATO Civil/Military Transport Working Groups". They seem to be intertwined continuously and there is a logic to that because most of the EU countries are in NATO and most of their armies have developed an interoperability and a sharing of information based on their membership of NATO. The danger is that the more we tie ourselves in to the EU military structures, our military and our IT systems then become synonymous with the NATO systems and become dependent on them.

Page 17 of that document also cites, "The importance of taking into account NATO when determining the development of capacities is also suggested, as a way of enhancing complementarity of efforts while benefiting from the work already developed, in particular in the areas of normalization and standardization". That is the concern. I remember when the referendum was held and Ireland signed in to the European Defence Agency and Denmark did not. These were the concerns people had, that we were getting tied. I am not arguing about an EU army in this case. I am whether, in all of the opt in or opt out options, full account taken of the dependence or interdependence that will arise from Ireland getting involved in programmes that are underlined or underscored by NATO which seems to have a greater interest in the European Union going in this direction?