Ms Niamh Ní Bhriain:

I thank the committee for the invitation to discuss the Security Action for Europe instrument, or SAFE. During the previous Government in April 2024 I appeared before this committee when it examined the EU’s Act in Support of Ammunition Production, which was a €500 million fund enacted under apparently exceptional circumstances that saw EU institutions bypass normal legislative procedures. Here we are again 18 months later discussing yet another exceptional piece of EU legislation concerning not hundreds of millions but €150 billion, a sum that is 300 times larger.

SAFE is a "...financial instrument designed to provide financial support to Member States to speed up defence readiness by allowing urgent and major investments in support of the European defence industry...". It was enacted on 29 May without national parliaments or indeed the European Parliament being afforded the opportunity to scrutinise it. The loans have tentatively been allocated and applicant countries are now preparing national investment plans due in November in order to secure the disbursement of funds. There are two concerns regarding safe’s legal underpinning. The first is in respect of Article 122 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which gives SAFE its legal basis. Article 122 is an emergency measure that permits the European Commission and the Council to bypass the Parliament in cases of "...severe difficulties caused by natural disasters or exceptional occurrences...". With EU member states' military spending currently at €343 billion, more than double that of Russia which is the EU’s alleged main adversary, there is no evidence it is necessary to spend the further €150 billion which Commission President Ursula von der Leyen says is "fully justified". There is no evidence to support that.

The European Parliament agrees with this and has taken a legal challenge against the Commission, but that legal challenge is on the basis of the legal underpinning of SAFE and not on the substance of it, which shows again that the Parliament is unwilling to fulfil its primary function, which is to hold an entirely unelected body that wields significant power and resources to account. Rather, the Parliament is seeking a workaround to rubber-stamp the Commission’s behaviour and wash its hands of the matter. This failure to hold to account the Commission was called out already by the office of the European Ombudsman.

A second legal question that arises here is Article 41.2 of the Treaty on the European Union, which prohibits the use of EU budget for "expenditure arising from operations having military or defence implications". SAFE will see applicant countries draw down loans that are secured against the EU's budget. If member states default on repayments it will fall to the EU as guarantor of the fund to pick up the bill. This would see the EU's budget being disbursed to cover the cost of procuring lethal weapons, something which is prohibited under EU law. Ireland, as a net contributor to the EU, would then potentially be picking up a part of that bill.

This must be seen in a broader overall context. In December 2020 the outgoing Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly sounded the alarm on what she said was "a powerful, unelected and untransparent culture at the top of the European Commission". SAFE embodies all of what is so fundamentally wrong with the EU: an unelected body creates a legally unsound pool of money in the form of €150 billion worth of loans that will be backstopped by the EU’s budget to fund the purchase of lethal weapons, something that is prohibited under EU law.

All of this is done in a manner that bypasses national parliaments, and even the European Parliament, so that by the time we discuss it, it is after the fact and the loans have already been allocated. This is a crisis in democracy.

It is not an isolated incident, though. It is part of a pattern where the EU has been running roughshod over its own laws for some time now. Though the EU is not a military union, it is preparing for war and SAFE is an essential part of that. In fact, it should be considered a war fund because it is anchored in the EU’s March 2025 White Paper for European Defence - Readiness 2030, which I have with me.

At this moment, as the European Union is preparing for war, the Irish Government, instead of enhancing safeguards to keep Ireland out of war, is actually removing them altogether by introducing legislation to dismantle the triple lock, which will put people directly in harm’s way. We are almost two years into Israel’s genocidal war in Palestine, now formally recognised as such by the UN. At least 69,000 people have been killed and as we sit here today, over 2 million people are being forcibly starved to death in Gaza, yet the EU still needs more time to act. Though references to Palestine and the triple lock may seem unrelated to the task at hand, discussing SAFE would be a futile exercise if we were not to take into account this broader context. It must be understood within the context where the EU and its member states have been eroding international law for quite some time in their normalisation of war and genocide.

Where does Ireland sit in this? Despite the legal concerns I set out and the broader context, the Tánaiste, Simon Harris, indicated in June that his Department "should leverage" the SAFE regulation to speed up the delivery of Ireland’s defence capability.

To conclude, I will reiterate what I said when I came before this committee 18 months ago, though I do not know that it was heeded then and I am not sure that it will be now. Ireland is a neutral country. We do not start wars, we do not participate in them and Article 29 of our Bunreacht calls for the peaceful settlement of international disputes, as does the UN Charter. Participating in the production of lethal weaponry that is used to start and prolong wars goes against the principles on which our nation and democracy were founded. Ireland must withhold public finance and political backing for this and all other war and military initiatives coming from Brussels and instead use our voice and our public resources for peace.