Dr. Karen Devine:

I also echo that given I only had the three minutes, I left my acknowledgements and thank-yous to afterwards, so I thank the committee for this opportunity as well. It is a real honour to be here.

Regarding Senator Higgins’s question on whether we will be less engaged in UN peacekeeping if the triple lock is removed, Professor Murphy cited UNDOF. That came up in the paper I just talked about, co-authored with Daniel Farrelly, about the deployments of Irish Defence Forces overseas. There is a quote in the PowerPoint - do not hold me over the coals on this but I believe it was Deputy Micheál Martin - I do not know in what capacity, whether he was Minister for Foreign Affairs or Taoiseach when he was speaking in the Dáil - who said it was to participate in the German battlegroup. One can see a direct replacement of UN peacekeeping being moved into the EU battlegroups, which the EU said it was not going to look for a UN mandate to deploy in relation to what it wants to do in operations. I state in my paper that UN peacekeeping amounts to significantly less than half of 1% of annual global military expenditure and is much cheaper than unilateral western and-or NATO or EU deployments. I am citing somebody there.

One very important point is that climate change emissions by militaries around the world are not counted as part of national emissions with regard to the panel on climate change and trying to reduce emissions. That is very important when the EU is going to be reducing Cohesion Fund and European Social Fund spending to put it into the €800 billion for armaments and militarisation. We need to be aware of that.

My final point in a way speaks to Senator Craughwell’s points, and Professor Murphy and Professor Maguire have already said this in different ways.