Mr. Stephen Kelly:

There is a good chance of it. I do not know whether it would be successful but there is every chance there could be a constitutional challenge. Advocates of neutrality have won referendums previously. There was the Crotty case and there were the McKenna and Coughlan cases. They were technically on the issue of divorce but they constituted strategic litigation. I draw the committee's attention to the case of Tomás Heneghan v. The Minister for Housing, Planning & Local Government & Ors. In that case, Mr. Justice Murray in the Supreme Court said that when a referendum is held, the commitment given by the Government to the people in that context constitutes a type of pact between the people and their elected representatives. That was in a different context so the facts were not the same. It was in the context of the Senate referendum in 1979, which a lot of people would forget about so the facts are a bit more obscure. A possible argument could be made in this case that a commitment was similarly given. It was not part of the official legislation the same way in 1979. It was not part of what was exactly on the ballot paper but a commitment was given and it was embodied in the Referendum Commission literature, which was distributed to every house in the country and paid for by the taxpayer. That could allow for a referendum to succeed if this is passed by the Dáil without another referendum.

As regards the veto, taking it from a first principles perspective, nobody would have designed the UN as it is. It does not make any sense in principle or theory why certain members have a permanent position while others do not. We all know the history, which is that those five permanent members were the victors in the Second World War and insisted on that place in order to set up the United Nations. I am very keen to listen to any alternative anyone has in terms of reforming the UN and the Security Council provided it is not something that results in the collapse of the UN because that is a very real risk. We know what happened with the League of Nations. It did not have the buy-in from the big powers. This needs to be avoided. Until such time as there is a workable alternative, we have to stick with the United Nations because it is better than the law of the jungle.

I will deal briefly with abdicating responsibility. I do not accept that we have a responsibility to defend Europe. We have a responsibility first of all to protect ourselves. There were three neutral states during the Cold War - Yugoslavia, Finland and Austria - that were in Russia's back garden and were never invaded. They adhered scrupulously to their neutrality so the idea that Russia is going to invade us when it has not even invaded those neutral states in their back garden is not really credible so I do not think we have a security obligation in that way.