Professor John Maguire:

I wish to contribute for a moment on the question the Senator raised on the implications for Irish neutrality. I would like to give a hard copy of the Swords to Ploughshares, StoP, report, the second publication, to the Chair and perhaps Deputy Conway-Walsh and Senator Higgins. Very significantly, StoP is an all-island organisation that is critiquing and working against the arms industry. We have done something unique in this regard. As citizens, we have gone through all the proceedings of the forum, tried to document them and tried to come back with a reaction. The reason I mention that is that Dame Louise Richardson, in her report from the forum, which by no means logically follows the mixum-gatherum that was the forum, states in a somewhat bemused way that Irish people seem to have loyalty to neutrality as an abstraction, but neutrality has been made an abstraction by our policymakers for 40 years. We have a celestial neutrality that nothing can ever affect while we get more and more involved in actual hell on earth.

It boggles my mind every time former presidents and various others say, "Of course we are not politically neutral; we are militarily neutral." In this regard, there are two lapidary statements to be noted. I will not read them out as they are on page 33 of A Force for Good. One of them is from the extraordinary manifesto of Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell in 1955, which is detailed in the relevant part of the document. To paraphrase, it states most of us are not neutral in feeling but that, as human beings, we must realise these problems cannot be solved by war. What bit of this do people not understand? Neutrality is not a matter of how we feel. It is not even a matter of who we think might be right in a conflict; it is a matter of how the conflict can be settled and how we can all come out of it alive and somehow address our differences. That is what Einstein and Russell implied. Exactly the same thing was said by Frank Aiken, again quoted on page 33 of the transcript of the General Assembly session in September 1957. He said we cannot go on with war in the nuclear age.

When you look at the threats of Russian manoeuvres with nuclear weapons on the border with Ukraine, you wonder what kind of road we are going down. Is someone going to say "Stop". I am not referring to stopping doing everything, but let us-----