Professor John Maguire:

We have had very direct references to the measure being considered. I and others - having looked at these questions for the best part of four decades since the Single European Act was introduced - consider that it is possible to see a process here where at every stage we are being told this is some small additional thing, and it makes sense in terms of what has gone before, and really there is no point in making a fuss about it. We have addressed this ourselves. I do not know if it is appropriate to circulate them, but I have two publications here, one from AFrI and one from another organisation. One relates to the Commission on the Defence Forces and the other relates to the forum. The point I would like to make is that it is wonderful to be here and to start what I genuinely hope will be a dialogue with our parliamentarians, which we have been seeking for decades. It is great to be here, but we are in a situation where we are looking at measures like this in the context of having had a Commission on the Defence Forces, which tells us what, according to the Tánaiste, we the citizens were failing to realise. This gives us a clear guidance on the nature of defence, the problems with the Defence Forces: the need to increase them, their role in Europe and indeed the dangers that we are meant to be facing and tackling in the world.

I might be dismissed here as a crusty old professor, but if one actually reads the report by the Commission on the Defence Forces, it is an extraordinarily complacent and unorganised document. I do not know if people have read it. I do not mean to be cynical, but sometimes documents are produced to be there rather than to be read, used and analysed. Sometimes documents are presented as holy writ, but they are certainly not wholly read. Often, they are not even partly read. If we look at the Commission on the Defence Forces – I do not mean to push us totally onto that - it is part of the allegedly rational scientific basis for Irish defence policy that the Irish people were missing when An Tánaiste said to us a couple of years ago that we have really to wake up and see that we are in a different kind of world. In the context of the Commission on the Defence Forces report, I would relish meeting some of our parliamentarians and looking at the initial critique I have contributed to the report.

May I circulate a document, Chairperson? Would that be appropriate?