Mr. Rory Montgomery:

I will leave Ukraine to Mr. Connelly, except to say that the sanctions have evolved progressively as the war has gone on. They are comprehensive. However, I do not know what sanctions actually do in the longer term. I think they weaken the Russians. They obviously weaken Russia's war effort and economy, although having said that Russia is still getting a considerable level of support from China and other countries outside the West. While sanctions undoubtedly had an effect on the regime change in South Africa, which was a long time ago, the Americans have had very severe sanctions against Cuba and Iran for half a century and more. I am not saying I do not favour sanctions but we have to be realistic about how effective they will actually be. I do not think they will be decisive in a conflict but they could have an impact.

On the neutrality question, I was the political director of the Department of Foreign Affairs for four years and was therefore dealing with foreign and security policy from 2005 to 2009. The Irish Government's approach over the last many years has been on the one hand to stay within our red line, which relates to any mandatory defence obligation and the autonomy of the decision-making of the EU, while at the same time recognising that most of our partners - an even larger number now that the Finns and Swedes want to join NATO - see NATO as at the heart of their own national security and want the EU to play something of a bigger role. How big that role is differs a bit between different member states, with France at one end and Poland at the other. At the same time, we have started to ensure the policy is framed in such a way as to enable us to take part in peacekeeping operations and peace support operations run by the EU with a UN mandate. Mr. Connelly will know this better than I do but I do not think there is some recording angel there keeping score. The reality is that our military capacity is so limited that we would not bring a lot to the table as regards NATO. Even the importance of the island of Ireland in the Second World War, for example, was based on military capacities that were very different and much more primitive than now.

I have two personal hobby horses. Without reviewing the question of Irish membership of NATO, and it is probably clear that there would not be public support for that, there are two things we can do. One issue is that the triple lock is entirely out of date. The idea that you need UN support, and a Security Council resolution in particular, to launch a mission gives a veto to Russia, China and the US and others too. We have only once been prevented from taking part in a mission but it also means there are missions launched by others that are clearly in the national and European interest but which we are unable to contemplate taking part in. That is something that at the very least should be carefully examined. To quote a former colleague, it is a bit absurd that on the one hand we are happy to require a decision by the UN Security Council, on which we are not represented and where other countries have vetoes, but are not prepared to accept a unanimous decision by the European Council, on which we are represented and where we do have a veto.

Second, there is in the Lisbon treaty a solidarity clause, so called, which requires member states to come to the aid of other members states by all means in their power. We went through lots of contortions during the Lisbon treaty campaign to secure a declaration stating, to paraphrase and simplify, that this would be interpreted by our partners as not including, necessarily, military participation. Again, one has to ask the question whether that a moral and appropriate stance for a member state of the European Union? It seems to me that we would still have the capacity to make our own decisions on exactly how to operate. If, for example, Estonia, Lithuania or wherever were to be the victim of a Russian attack, are we really saying that we would tie our own hands to a point where we would not offer such limited support as we might? Those are my personal opinions.