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

If I may make the point, please, Mr. Borrell is talking about a 5,000 strong force to respond, should they be needed, to make an intervention. Even in those kinds of interventions, Ireland has never been forced to respond to them. We will decide and that is our position, if we will be involved or if we will not. If we have not trained with other countries, however, or are not interoperable with them, we will then not have the choice to go even if we want to. We will not be wanted because we will not be able to operate properly in partnership with others.

We will commit, for example, from 2025 onwards to be part of a joint training project which is called a battle group in Germany. We have done that before in Finland and in Germany. Again this is about interoperability and it has in fact never been called upon. It is an unfortunate name because it is actually about a peace intervention, in real terms. This is about training, capacity and ensuring that our skill set is where it needs to be to keep our people safe and to be able to make interventions should they be needed and should we make the political decision ourselves to make those interventions.

Since we made the decision in principle on the mine clearance issue, the war in Ukraine has obviously evolved and we can see now the practicalities around some of these training mechanisms. If we were called upon to be part of helping to get millions of tonnes of grain out of Odessa, or ports around that city, one would like to be in the position to have at least the option to respond in the affirmative. We need to be meeting these standards and, whether people like it or not, the benchmarks in standards by and large around interoperability and skill sets with the EU countries with which we will be partnering are predominantly NATO benchmarks.