Professor John Maguire:

On that point, not only does Article 29 refer to peaceful judicial determination, etc., there is no additional clause which states that if this does not work, we can attack people or threaten them. Looking at Article 28, which clearly refers to declarations of war, it is very clearly about defence of the national territory. It is not about any of the kinds of missions that the Army Ranger Wing – and, by the way, this is morphing into Ireland’s special operations force – has been involved in in Mali and elsewhere. Military intelligence are trying to find out what they have been at in Afghanistan – that is, former Army Rangers and possibly current members of the Defence Forces.

I would love to have three very quick bites at the environmental cherry, and then I will go quiet again. It is very relevant if the committee is having the Department of Defence and others, including the Commission, in. It would be easy to just take the mickey out of the fact that there is a phrase in the Commission's report which refers to green ammunition and green pyrotechnics. However, one does wonder what is meant by green ammunition and green pyrotechnics. The purpose of defence is clear, it says. However, we are not told what the purpose of the military is; the Commission simply declares that it is compatible with defence of the environment. There must have been someone in the Department of the Environment weeping over those passages in the Commission's report, which is simply inadequate.

My second point relates to a report last week by Conor Gallagher, a journalist for The Irish Times, who named the universities and colleges that are looking for research money from the EU in respect of military matters. I do not call them defence matters; they are miliary matters. Conor Gallagher makes the very important point that Ireland is putting quite an amount of money into these funds and that we want something back. The most recent occasion on which I heard that phrase was the last event I attended to just before lockdown, which was the Slándáil conference in the Helix. The Slándáil organisation was set up by a former Army Ranger. It is very salient in all these matters. In a workshop on defence-related research, so called, a senior Irish public official – and I will not name anyone – who spoke about their role in channelling funds from Brussels to Ireland using exactly the same phrase in order that we would get more bang for our buck. That was really what they were talking about. Someone present said that they were having a problem with their research project in their university and that they could not get it off the ground because some academics were a bit iffy about it. Our public official said they thought they knew the university in question and that they thought they knew a way around what was happening. What is going on in these areas is so far away from Article 29 and the notion of genuine defence and what we should be doing that we have reached the point where there is an enormous can of worms to unlock.

I am sorry that I went on too long.