Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is just like the situation where we did not need to go through a triple lock process to send a ship to the Mediterranean because it was not a UN mission. It was a bilateral support mission with the Italians that was based on a humanitarian cause that needed and benefited from an Irish intervention and that pulled 16,000 people out of the sea to save their lives. I hope the Deputy is not suggesting we should not have done that because we did not have a triple lock. There are certain times when the triple lock in terms of the UN mandate is not necessary. I have always been upfront and, on any decision I have made as Minister for Defence, I am very happy to go before the Dáil, the Seanad and the committee to explain and to argue the rationale. There are no quiet decisions to do something without fully testing politically those decisions, and that goes for the training mission in Mali or for any of the other decisions I have made.

We have signalled clearly now to the UN that we will not be continuing our presence in the UN mission in Mali and, to be honest, we are keeping our EU training mission under pretty close watch too. Things are changing in Mali and not for the better. Our security assessment in Mali has not changed as to the threat levels but we need to be very aware of what has been happening politically in Mali, which is moving in the wrong direction. The current government is there on the basis of a coup that followed another coup, and it does not have a democratic mandate and has not given the kind of timelines that should be expected in terms of elections and so on.