Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank both of our guests. Some of the experts we have had before us were sometimes not very direct or clear but I cannot say that is true of both presentations today. Neither of our experts minced their words. They were very direct which is very helpful to us in terms of our interaction. I was interested in Mr. McNamara's comment on experts and our experience with the economic crash. As somebody who was involved in trying to fix things after that, I can say that not all experts were correct. While I do not share Mr. Michael Gove's view of experts when he said that people were fed up with experts who frequently get it wrong, a lot of experts do. One can get expert views to coincide with whatever perspective one has.

To deal with specifics, I will pose a question to Mr. McNamara first on the Finnish experience. Most of us would view Ireland and Finland as very different in terms of the security threat we face because Finland has the longest land border with Russia of any European country. Certainly, with the experience of Putin expansionism and his declared threats, there is a very real and substantial threat to the sovereignty and integrity of Finland. That is not true of Ireland. I would be interested in Mr. McNamara's view on that, as a comparison.

I will now turn to his view of building Ireland's defence capacity. After the report of the Commission on the Defence Forces was published, there was a consensus, as far as I could see - I stayed for the debate in the Dáil and contributed to it - across all political parties that we needed to up our game in terms of expenditure. However, that was perceived by many as a completely separate issue from the question of whether we should be part of some external alliance as well. The vindication of our own independent sovereignty requires us to know who is in our air space or travelling through our waters but that is a completely separate issue. I am interested in hearing the views of both of our contributors on increasing our capacity to defend ourselves as an issue that is separate and distinct from joining some military alliance.

On that issue, my final question relates to the LOA. Dr. Fitzsimmons talked in terms of LOA 3 being what is required. Most people who spoke in the Dáil debate talked in a consensus way of LOA 2. That would increase our expenditure from roughly €1 billion to €1.5 billion per annum whereas LOA 3 would triple our expenditure to €3 billion per annum. Maybe it is my training with the then Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, but for any Department to look for a tripling of its expenditure would be quite extraordinary. Even at that, we would not be able to do all the things that Dr. Fitzsimmons set out, like producing fighter jets. Countries like the Czech Republic lease fighter jets and I suppose that is within our capacity. Realistically, we are not going to be in a position to be able to do all the things that Dr. Fitzsimmons set out as a requirement for us and be in any way within the parameters of acceptable expenditure. I listened to the report of the Central Bank this morning which said that the Government must stay within its 5% expenditure ceiling. I would be interested in hearing our guests' views on those points.