Dr. Eamonn Cahill:

I thank the Deputy for his question. The genesis of export controls globally probably dates back to shortly after the Second World War. The controls took off during the Cold War. As the Deputy can well understand, it was very much about the western powers wanting to make sure that nuclear technology and other weapons of mass destruction, and affiliated technologies, did not get into the hands of those who would use them for nefarious purposes. Several of these informal groupings emerged over the period, whereby various like-minded countries came together to work to help to identify lists of technologies and items that they felt should be kept under some sort of control to prevent them becoming freely available on the global stage.

The Wassenaar Arrangement is the arrangement most relevant to Ireland because it covers the technology gamut, certainly including ICT but going well beyond that to include machinery and so forth. Approximately 42 states participate in the Wassenaar Arrangement globally, including all the major powers, such as the US and Russia. It is not an international body in the sense of the UN or anything like that; it is very much a more informal body. Its primary activity involves technical experts from the participating states coming together for intensive discussions. They thrash out the precise technical specifications of items that should be subject to control. The items on the published list, which I mentioned, are not identified only at the level of their overall functionality but also down to the level of their individual performance characteristics. For pumps, it would be to do with their throughput in cubic metres per second and so forth. For electrical items, it would be about their power characteristics, frequency responses and so forth. It is highly technical.