Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent)

I thank Ms Ní Bhriain. I would like to go to the second half of my questions. Given that those documents came in after our call for submissions I would be very happy to receive comments related to those new documents. That would be useful.

The last thing I will say about social cohesion, before I go to the expenditure piece, is that it strikes me when we think about security and social cohesion that the United States has the most well-funded military in the world yet we have seen extraordinary exploitation of the creation of division. We have seen a rise of quite far right perspectives. Arguably, I know there have been suggestions that the lack of social cohesion and the creation of division has been encouraged by and beneficial to certain actors who have been accused of disinformation, such as Russia and others. Having a very large military is not the thing that actually protects you in those circumstances whereas social cohesion and dialogue are the kinds of things that offer very good protection and merit investment.

This leads to my next point. The thing about weapons is that when they are bought and built we do not know, ultimately, who gets to use them. Instead of investing in social cohesion to hold our European Union and the societies within it together in the face of very divisive far right and authoritarian perspectives, we now see a switch to the idea of creating large armies in every country, but we do not know who gets to use them. This is something that came up in the context of the arms support Act when the previous committee reviewed that. We heard from the Commission then that there did not seem to be any safeguards. We know for a fact that of the €500 million fund, which is much smaller than the huge funds we are talking about now, some of it went to arms manufacturers to boost their production. Some of it went directly to companies that provide tank missiles to Israel that have been used in Gaza. That is a fact. It is on the public record. We know that is the case. The Commission simply indicated there were no protections in place in relation to that.

What is not clear to me is that this extraordinary channelling of funding into the military industry does not seem to be coming with any caveats at the moment. Maybe Ms Ní Bhriain can confirm or clarify if she knows of anything. It should have been scrutinised at European Parliament level, where this might have been teased out, and it is disgraceful that it was not. We have not seen any evidence that it is tied with the productive capacity of arms manufacturers, that those might not be used in exports. We were told it is because the emergency framing is that we need arms within Europe but it does not mean those arms will be constrained within Europe. For example, in Germany, as I understand it, there was a ten-fold increase in the export of weapons to Israel during the period of those military actions. In that context, there does not seem to be a constraint on how this increased military capacity will be used and how much of it will effectively benefit companies who will be acting.

A key point Ms Ní Bhriain mentioned, and I would love if she could elaborate on it, was the components. Will she elaborate on that 35% piece? The idea that we could be funding and, through procurement, creating the guaranteed market that allows the development of weaponry and components which could eventually contribute to and become part of one of the products which, horrendously, have been marketed as battle-tested weapon technologies from Israel. They have been marketed as battle-tested and that they had tried out those new experimental weaponry tools. Earlier this week, I sat at a meeting of the committee on foreign affairs and we heard about the robot tanks currently demolishing large sections of Gaza city.

I just want to be clear on where the money might be going. There does not seem to be constraints in terms of preventing that. The 35% issue seems to be a recipe for that. In terms of-----