Mr. Barry Andrews:

What is neutrality? While I know the committee has been through this and I know it is not the main purpose of this discussion but the consultative forum chaired by Dame Louise Richardson heard lots of different views on what neutrality is. Reference was made to the Hague Convention of 1907 but that includes political neutrality. We do not comply with that convention with regard to our position on Ukraine, so we are not neutral in that way. Austria is neutral but adheres to Article 42 of the Treaty on European Union on common European defence so it is a very strange position. We are quite a strong neutral in comparison with anybody else in the EU. Therefore, to try to capture that idea in a referendum with our history of referendums would be a really difficult thing to do and would create constraints on our capacity to carry out our foreign policy and in particular to deploy troops for lots of the purposes contained in the general scheme of the Bill that is before this committee. I would be very worried about that not only defining neutrality but that in the case of a referendum, we could end up with an answer to a question we did not ask. It can be difficult sometimes. We know that with the Lisbon treaty, part of the answer was the need for safeguards and this was where the triple lock came in. There were, however, also questions about tax autonomy in Ireland and subsequently we changed our position on tax, there were questions about abortion and subsequently we changed our position on abortion and there were questions about the triple lock and we are in the process of considering whether the triple lock is an appropriate constraint on our foreign policy.