Dr. Edward Burke:

It is interesting to look at the Multi-National Force - Iraq, MNF-I, that was mandated on 20 October 2003 and then look at the International Security Assistance Force, ISAF, in Afghanistan, which Ireland voted to set up as a member of the Security Council. On both missions, Ireland said that these were UN-mandated missions. The UN Security Council and the United States put pressure on Ireland, regarding Afghanistan, to do more. Members can look at WikiLeaks from 2009, if they wish, but they are Members of the Oireachtas, so they would not do that. There were some very interesting cables from Dublin. US diplomats were making strong representations and the Government position was that it understood there was a UN Security Council resolution, but that was not Ireland's posture. That is not what we do. That is not the type of operation we want to engage in. The Government made the choice that this was not something that would be brought before the Oireachtas. That view of who we were in terms of our military policy played out in terms of not putting Irish troops into UN Security Council-mandated operations. The United States maintained that these operations were peace support. Yes, there was an expansive mandate to deal with the Taliban but the US maintained that Ireland should be entirely in favour of this as a member of the United Nations. They questioned why Ireland would not do it. We made a choice on that and that is important. When I was in Afghanistan, ISAF had seven soldiers. Because of our policy, they were only doing counter-IED work. Our primary task was working with the Ministry of Interior Affairs, MOI, and the Ministry of Defense, MOD, to do counter-IED training. The gardaí who were there were much more operationally expansive. The emergency response unit, ERU, worked with me there. The gardaí were operational in the provinces of Afghanistan in a way that the Defence Forces were not. They were very focused on ISAF headquarters and on the MOD and MOI.