Mr. Eoin Miche?l McNamara:

These are very complicated issues. I am trying to focus on what Deputy Ó Murchú said. I then have to think about the alternation arrangement.

The very Irish nationalist thing to do is to invest in and rebuild our Defence Forces. We need to increase the offer and attractiveness of the service. There are Irish people living abroad writing on security issues, not just about Ireland but across different European countries. I am not one for emotions. I like realist sober analysis. I hope I have underlined that here today. However, one emotional thing that got under my skin was all of the members of the Defence Forces who would write to me telling me they really like an article I wrote about NATO, drone strikes or something like that. I have got to know perhaps 20 or 30 of them across the board. I know we have troubles. I wrote a very hard-hitting article on the independent review group, IRG, report published by the Royal United Services Institute, RUSI, a couple of weeks ago. They are incredible people. They are the best people I have met in Irish society. It has warmed my heart abroad that these people, including different officers, people from enlisted ranks and NCOs, have reached out to me and want to discuss my research with me. It touched my heart.

We can recruit a lot of people like this. I have spoken to the people in RACO. We can still recruit, but we cannot retain them because they are very good and are in demand. The civilian economy can take them. They want to go because the job is tough. We are asking a lot of them. The more the numbers fall, the more we ask of them. We are leaning on them. Irish society needs to understand their role. They are a down payment on our security and future and the future of our prosperity and Irish social progression. I do not live in the society at the moment. I hope to return. All of my family are from here.

On the fair player aspect, it is something that is played up. Sweden is about to join NATO. I was in Stockholm a month or two ago. It, along with Ireland, is seen as one of the most supportive countries in the EU on Palestine. Nobody in Stockholm is saying it joining NATO will harm its relations with Palestine. We tend to tie the NATO issue to Britain, British imperialism and all of that when it is criticised by the Irish left here. Other European countries see it as a broad multilateral alliance.

Those issues are not as unconnected as some Irish activists might have us believe. Finland was involved in the Good Friday Agreement through the involvement of Harri Holkeri and people like that. I know how things work in Finland. It has a very impressive global peace mediation department in its ministry of foreign affairs. It has a crisis management initiative NGO, the Martti Ahtisaari Peace Foundation. Members will remember him from his work in Northern Ireland. We are consumers of all of the global peace mediation conducted out of Helsinki. One organisation is an NGO, but it is very close to and funded by the Finnish Government. It mediated conflict all over the world. Finland put resources into that and put its money where its mouth is when it came to being an honest broker. Its former President, Urho Kekkonen, said Finland must be the physician and not the judge when it comes to international relations and must try to fix problems rather than judge, even though he was a high priest of Finlandisation. There is entanglement there.

Beyond our Defence Forces and blue helmet operation, we have not put many resources into this. There was going to be a conflict resolution unit in the Department of Foreign Affairs. That is simply a shell. It is a website. Perhaps there are now some staff connected to it but they are not very active and nowhere near the level of independent Nordic states. We have not put resources into this but we talk a good game. That is disappointing.