Dr. Karen Devine:

I mentioned a paper co-authored with Daniel Farrelly where we looked at the results of parliamentary questions about the deployment of Irish Defence Forces overseas. I should be able to put it up on my website, drkarendevine.com, so people can have access to it. I think it is floating around there somewhere as part of the Desmond Greaves summer school. I noticed something about the period around April 2008. This is from memory, so do not hold me over the coals if I am slightly off on the timing, but the timing sticks in my mind because we were going to have a referendum on the Lisbon treaty. There is a graph in which the blue line plots the number of Irish Defence Forces deployed overseas on UN missions, the red line plots Irish Defence Forces in an EU-mandated mission and the black line is for NATO. Normally, the blue line is higher than the black and red lines, but there was a moment in 2008 when there was a scissors movement whereby there were no Irish Defence Forces deployed on UN peacekeeping missions for the first time and there were maintained deployments. I mentioned KFOR to Senator Kyne. There were Irish Defence Forces maintained in terms of EU and NATO missions. As regards Deputy Gibney's question as to what it will look like if the triple lock goes, I think that scissors movement will be a permanent switch and I think that is why the Government is seeking to abolish the triple lock. I will not say anything more because Professor Ray Murphy has already articulated what he believes in terms of the Defence Forces' perspectives. I used to lecture the Defence Forces for many years through Maynooth University as an adjunct and I concur with his perspective on what the Defence Forces feel about UN peacekeeping and being involved in operations that are not UN peacekeeping.