Ms Niamh Ní Bhriain:

On the question of whether we can defend ourselves if we are militarily neutral, one has to ask oneself what it means to defend oneself. For example, let us say the Government is planning on buying fighter jets and having them stationed in Shannon. I am from County Clare and the idea we would have fighter jets on the runway in Shannon terrifies me, especially when we have no functioning hospital in Ennis and people from there have to go to Limerick to get the hospital treatments they need. When we are looking at what we need to defend ourselves, we need to ask what we need to make us feel secure. If we were to ask people in County Clare whether they would feel more secure having fighter jets on the runway in Shannon or having a functioning hospital, I think we would find they would all choose the functioning hospital. Going beyond that, what are we going to do with the fighter jets? If we send them out over the Atlantic and they see a suspicious ship, take aim and fire, what happens next? Imagine that is a Russian ship, for example, because we hear about Russian ships all the time. That means Ireland is in direct conflict with a nuclear power.

The concept of defence really needs to be interrogated. As a small island nation with very limited defence resources, our best and only defence is our neutrality because we could never go up against a nuclear power or any other military and we should never try because the results would be catastrophic. We should make sure we do not get attacked in the first place and that is about maintaining an active neutrality policy. With neutrality, military neutrality and all these concepts, we have to look at what we actually mean when we come to a situation where we are sending a fighter jet over the Atlantic and it ends up taking aim, potentially, at a Russian ship and then Ireland is in conflict with a nuclear power.