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

I am sure my officials will kill me for saying this, but I would happily bring forward an options paper on how we might address some of the concerns that have been outlined by the committee. I would happily do that in the early autumn when we return after the summer recess. There are ways in which we can provide a lock system of sorts but at the same time not hand a veto to a government or country that we do not regard as consistent with our value system. That is what we have at the moment. It has not been a problem to date, in reality. It could potentially have been a problem theoretically but it has not been, which is why there has not been a big focus on it. I think it did perform a useful political purpose in giving reassurance around the neutrality question in the sense that everything we did required a UN mandate, which made many people comfortable. The truth is that UN mandates can now be vetoed by countries whose motivation and priorities we do not share. If we are to be a serious country in terms of peacekeeping and peace interventions, and if we want to be able to make decisions for ourselves as a country that is non-aligned militarily, then we need to be able to make decisions by ourselves with the right motivation. I think we can do things to add to that and to give the reassurance that some Deputies will look for in terms of consistency with international law and the invitation of the country concerned. We can look for consistency with various UN resolutions or whatever else. There are options at which we can look. If it would be helpful to the committee, I could bring in some options at which we could look and discuss. I would like to get agreement on this with other political parties rather than have the Government force it through. These are important issues and I would like as many as people in the Oireachtas as possible to be comfortable with them, as opposed to it becoming a debate around something it is not. We may well have to have a debate in the future around neutrality, if that is justified, but I am not proposing to have that debate in the context of how and where we send our troops. The triple lock is a separate issue. It is potentially a problem because of the way in which global politics has changed in the past five or six months. I do not believe we should be operating in a straitjacket on the basis of relying on certain countries not vetoing decisions we would like to make.

We can consider some of the suggestions made by Deputy Berry but there is no tradition of qualified majority voting, QMV, in the Oireachtas, as far as I am aware. There are ways in which I think we can put safeguards in place to ensure no future Government will run away with this issue and force it through easily without some safety mechanisms.