Mr. Eoin Miche?l McNamara:

I welcome Senator Chambers's comments and thank her for them. I will talk about this through my own experience. To my surprise, I have been part of the honest conversations in Finland. As I mentioned, I work for a research institute that is under the Parliament of Finland but which is academically fully fire-walled. The Finns wanted the research institute to have honest conversations, to face the public rather than universities. I used to teach at university myself and have great respect for university academics but sometimes they can get a bit lost internally. The Finns wanted a research institute that would face the public, to spark these honest conversations and to have discussions. They put it under the remit of the Parliament but it is fully fire-walled. The Parliament funds the institute. As everyone knows, parliaments can never fully agree so rather than put the institute under a ministry, where it might potentially act as a mouthpiece, it was put under the eduskunta, the Parliament of Finland.

I am primarily a NATO expert. It is probably good that Deputy Carthy did not hear me say that. NATO is the most important security organisation in Europe and we have to tackle the big questions. I happen to be from Ireland. I was involved a lot with the Finnish press when Finland was joining NATO. If one reads the Finnish press, one will see that my name crops up quite a lot in the months leading up to the Finnish NATO membership. I was talking about the war in Ukraine and Finnish NATO membership. I also made the odd cameo appearance, via Zoom, on Irish channels at that time.

In Finland, they had these debates for years. Some people were very pro-Finnish and pro-non-alignment and spoke about Finnish independent defence capacity while others were pro-NATO and talked about "Never again alone" and becoming a full member of the West. They had these debates for ten years or more, back and forth, back and forth. The debates were very prominent in the media. All sorts of ideas were discussed, covering all of the dimensions the Senator mentioned. That is why Finland was able to decide so quickly. The Finnish public knew and were very well informed. I could get into a taxi in Helsinki or sit beside someone in a café and have these conversations. My name would appear in the press and often my picture would be included so people would say "That's your man". They would not say it like that obviously, but they would recognise me as the guy who comments on NATO and would ask me questions. I got messages to my email and messages on Twitter from people who were very worried about the war and who asked me to explain it to them. They wanted to know if they should be worried.

The people in Finland are very well informed and they saw that the security environment had changed. The security environment changed in the lead-up to the war when Vladimir Putin said that there should be no more new members for NATO, which was in violation of the OSCE's Charter of Paris of 1990 and the Charter for European Security of 1999, which says all states are free to choose and adjust their own security arrangements. Putin was potentially denying Finland that flexibility. The Finnish people understood that because they were very well informed. They were well informed because they had been having these honest conversations.

We are talking again about more funding. Are we going to have an international relations institute funded by the Oireachtas, costing €4 million a year, just to have foreign policy conversations? Irish academics and émigré academics like myself need to speak up, to write op-eds and other articles. I have been doing it and I would encourage my colleagues at Irish universities, as well as other stakeholders who are not academics, to make their voices heard. That is why I welcome the consultative forum that is starting tomorrow. Honest conversations are important.