Dr. Karen Devine:

I thank Senator Clonan, in particular for explaining what it is like to speak to this topic. I am an academic and I have been in DCU for nearly 20 years. I have been studying neutrality for 30 years. I am not on social media due to the abuse that is there and coming from those quarters. In my paper, I outlined some of the things I face. My course on Irish foreign policy is constantly being axed. There is no need to go into it here but social media is just the tip of the iceberg of what you experience when you try to speak to neutrality as an academic.

The Senator mentioned 50 op-eds. The EU funds think-tanks. In my paper, I explained that since the conflict in Ukraine in 2022 escalated, within 18 months 800 EU think-tank reports were published. This shows the level of propaganda and funding of that propaganda. In some of the quarters the Senator cited, many of those involved are what are called Jean Monnet lecturers. A lot of people in Ireland do not know what a Jean Monnet lecturer is. It is somebody in a university who occupies the position of an academic but actually is not an academic, according to the Jean Monnet lecturers themselves, because they are not dispassionate. They do not carry out critical inquiry. When the EU is criticised, they jump to its defence. They are called Jean Monnet lecturers because the EU directly pays their salary or a good portion of their salary. They are paid to promote the agenda of the EU and that is perhaps part of the reason they are so abusive to people who stand in their way, as they see it.

Albert Bandura had a theory of moral disengagement and some of that can explain what the Government and those agents the Senator talked about are doing and the way they are doing it. There is another academic theory of elite socialisation which posits that the elite in Ireland have actually transferred their allegiance and identity to the EU level, they do not identify with Ireland and the Irish people and they do not see themselves as representing our interests. That is why they are not talking about the mutual defence clause because they see Ireland as a subregion of the EU and they do not feel the need to talk about it in that respect.

In terms of illegal operations, in my paper I went through illegal operations launched against Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya - the list is there - and there was one instance where NATO bombed the equivalent of RTÉ, the state national broadcaster in Belgrade, Serbia. The relatives of the dead and injured took NATO to court. France's defence said that "well, we may have carried out this illegal bombing but we did not do it as France. We did it as NATO and NATO has no legal personality so you cannot prosecute us.". That is so dangerous. However, the EU does have legal personality because it wanted to be a global actor and in that way, it has actually left itself open to prosecution.