Dr. Karen Devine:

Essentially, NATO has told its members that they cannot sign that treaty. I published a paper, "A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing?", on this in 2020. It is available online. NATO and militarism and breaches of international law are incompatible with something like the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Ireland in a way echoed Frank Aiken, which Professor Maguire talked about earlier and in the book A Force for Good? Ireland's diplomacy was echoing all of that good work during Ireland's golden era of the UN in creating the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Now we have Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The other thing that a lot of people do not talk about is that Emmanuel Macron has been pushing for the EU to adopt what he calls the euro bomb. He wants to Europeanise French nuclear weapons. In that scenario, Ireland would be considered, as part of the EU, to be a nuclear power. This is against the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. It is about what we have done in our history in terms of contributions to peace and security. If we get rid of the triple lock, we are saying that UN rules do not apply. If UN rules do not apply, what does it say about those UN treaties that we have put so much effort into creating to try to prevent the spread of weapons?