Dr. Edward Burke:

I will briefly add to that a system problem when I was in my 20s and at university - Richard Sinnott's research picked up on this - which was the paucity of debate about Ireland's strategic interests and defence policy. There were a lot of do-not-knows around the time of the Nice and Lisbon treaty referendums. I thought it was regrettable in some ways that we did not have a more frank discussion about what precisely neutrality is, what alignment is, whether it is possible to be aligned with the EU and not be a NATO member state and therefore not bound to automatically go to war. There are things we can do as an EU member state that may move away from the kind of concept of neutrality that really only took root later. Seán Lemass remarked that neutrality was simply a temporary tool of the Government and that we were western aligned.

There was a reason we went to the Congo in July 1960. It was because the United States, Belgium and France asked for white only troops to go to Katanga in August 1960 and UN headquarters acceded to that request. That is something we should not have done. The then Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, was absolutely against it and we should have had a much more advanced political debate about why there were only Swedish and Irish troops in this area and African troops were excluded. They were later included but only after Patrice Lumumba, the Prime Minister of DRC, was deposed in a western intelligence fostered coup. My point is that we need to think carefully about why we do things, what our strategic interests are, and what the international humanitarian law and obligations under the law of armed conflict are. If we had thought about that more carefully in the summer of 1960, we might have had a more informed and careful UN operation at that time. I would also argue that even on EUFOR Chad, when it came to France, the former colonial power with lots of interests, we should have had a more developed debate and discussion in the Oireachtas about what this would mean for the perception of Ireland in that part of Africa with France being the dominant power, including in EUFOR in Chad, even if we were the force commander, etc.

More involved discussions are needed. I welcome this conversation. This is fantastic because it is not easy. This is no shibboleth. There are no easy slogans. Neutrality has different meanings for different countries and different people. We cannot assume there is a given definition that everyone understands. I have tried to explain why I think we are aligned with the European Union and I do not have a problem with that. It does not mean we are going to war. We do not have any treaty obligations to do so, but we can help Ukraine and the Baltic states and EU defence. There is nothing wrong with that, including with some people in our university centre being able to contribute to the future of defending European democracies. I have no problem with that at all.