Ms Niamh Ní Bhriain:

I will take the question on the changing world. Over the course of the research I have been doing on the European Union, it is changing in that it started out as a political and economic union and then legally it has evolved, with Nice and Lisbon, so that the European Union is now very much a fully fledged military union. This is a change that has come about during the duration of Ireland’s membership of the European Union. That militarisation has gone hand in hand with the European Union inviting in arms companies. As I wrote in my submission, it has been very much influenced by arms companies and arms lobbyists, which have set up shop in Brussels and are actively influencing the shape of policy in the European Union. We have seen that with the group of personalities that was rolled out in 2015. For the first time ever, we have funding going directly from the European Union to the research and development of military equipment and weaponry, which is highly contested under the European Union’s own law. Therefore there is a change in that sense because until the last two decades, the European Union was not so much a militarised union in the way it has become and that is where the pressure points are for Ireland as a member of the European Union.