Dr. Kenneth McDonagh:

How will I follow that? Maybe to pick up on the point of neutrality, Professor Tonra has summarised it quite well. It is not a definition of neutrality we need. The question I always ask and we need to ask is what neutrality does in the context of the political debate. It is something that has moved in an Irish context into the realm of an identity and a value rather than something that is a rational assessment of a set of policy options. That is why the debate quickly becomes heated and very little light gets shed on it.

In that context, that was the disappointment I had with the consultative forum. I want to clarify that I did think it was a great idea to have it and that is why I participated in it, but it was the outcome it descended into. Given that the panel I was on was about NATO partnership, we had a serving Irish naval officer who was seconded to NATO, we had someone from NATO, and we had another academic. However, it quickly became a shouting match about things that had nothing to do with anything on the panel instead of asking what our partnership with NATO means, what does Ireland get out of it, what does NATO get out of it, could we move further, should we step away from it and that kind of positive discussion. That was because we were bringing facts to a values fight, for the want of a better term. Approaching that question will be very tricky, as we saw with our near neighbour. When values are on the table, facts can sometimes be much more malleable or much more manipulated than they are elsewhere.

On the point about the intelligence services, I think it is a real issue. Professor Tonra already alluded to the questions around security clearance. That is for officials or for those in the private and academic sectors. It is a barrier but it is also a case of prudence on the part of the State. We have friends and they are good friends and we like them but there is no harm in having a capability to verify certain things because those friends have interests as well and they might not always fully align with our own interests. Again, we have seen that in our recent relations with a close neighbour post Brexit. We have seen points of clash where we might want to be wary of what things might roll over into other issue areas such as security. It is a major gap.

The third part of that is the democratic oversight piece. We need to have intelligence gathering, we need to have informed security decision-making and we need to have opportunities for people from Opposition parties, perhaps in closed meetings of committees such as this, to interrogate that and ask if we are making real decisions based on good evidence or if this evidence is being skewed. Without our own capability in that regard, it is a serious gap.

On the issue of the Atlantic Ocean, it is a big a place and, even with nine ships and a few more aeroplanes, it would not be possible for Ireland to police it on its own. The reality is we already do not. We already co-operate with a number of European bodies and international bodies when it comes to things like drug interdiction. We saw the effect of that last year with a very significant haul and it would seem that a more military element to that would be a logical extension, at least in terms of having the capability. If we want to call it a coastguard or a naval mission instead, that might be one option. It would very quickly run into the quagmire of debates around what this would mean for neutrality if these active missions were then coming back to Ireland. However, perhaps in a drug interdiction, trafficking or smuggling sense that might be something that connects it to people's lived reality in a way that our lived reality of the security threats are not necessarily there.

On research, no academic will say "No" to more research funding but it is something worth exploring. One of the questions I would have, if we are to set up this kind of institution, is what it would be co-ordinated to. Would we still lack a clear statement by the Government that these are the threats and risks that Ireland faces, these are the capabilities we have to deal with, and these are the gaps we need to address? Without that sort of foundation, there is not really any point in creating a research agency because it would not have a centre of gravity towards which it would be working.