Mr. Joe Murray:

It was a representation of Ireland at its best, politically and in the context of the NGO sector. There was an NGO coalition to support the treaty. AFrI was central to that. The person who was employed to work on that operated out of the AFrI office and later worked for AFrI. It is an example of the way Ireland should go. It is totally in the spirit of Frank Aiken who is a hero of mine for what he achieved in the United Nations. Over a three-year period, he achieved what were called the Irish resolutions, all of which were moving towards the non-proliferation treaty that eventually was agreed. That is why I find this so depressing. It is another salami slicing of Irish neutrality. It is happening all the time. Here is another example of it. We are moving in a total opposite direction to Frank Aiken’s achievements in the United Nations and we are moving away from the pride that we can feel in having been involved in negotiating the cluster munitions treaty. It is in the context of, as was mentioned already, the shocking growth of the international arms trade. There is an organisation called SIPRI that publishes a report every year on military expenditure around the world. That expenditure is increasing every year. It is has increased dramatically in the past 12 months. We are now at a figure of $2.4 trillion. That is the annual military budget globally. We asked the question: what could we achieve if even part of that budget was used for tackling poverty, healthcare and climate change?

All of what we are doing and discussing today is adding to the obscene wastage of resources and the obscene direction towards war and away from peace. It is a shocking reality that we do not seem to realise the danger of the direction in which we are heading.