Helen McEntee (Meath East, Fine Gael)
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A couple of members have commented on the war in Ukraine. While we all utterly condemn what is a completely unnecessary and barbaric war, between 40,000 and 50,000 Russian soldiers are being sent to their deaths every month by their President. The loss of life more generally is truly devastating. Every month, between 30,000 and 40,000 Russian soldiers and many thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are being killed.

Until this war ends, we will not really see the scale and the loss of life but there are a lot of people suffering unnecessarily at the hands of a very small number of people who are waging this war.

In terms of the triple lock, most colleagues will be aware that it was introduced at a time Ireland was looking to sign up to a number of treaties. The treaties themselves are very explicit as to what our neutrality means, namely that we cannot join any military alliance. That does not prevent us from investing in our defence or engaging with other countries on defence matters, sharing of intelligence, training, security matters, hybrid threats or cybersecurity. We have been doing that over time. We have just discussed the UN and the Security Council. When it comes to the deployment of troops, it was not envisaged that new missions would be blocked or not even voted on because of a threat of a veto by one of the five permanent members, but times have changed. Since that legislation was introduced, no new mission has been agreed since 2014. The UNIFIL mission that Ireland has been a significant part of for many years has come to an end because the US would have blocked its progress last year. We can either change our legislation to be able to respond to that changing dynamic or we can do nothing and find that our troops, who are renowned worldwide and many of whom got into the Defence Forces because they wanted to be involved in these types of missions, are no longer able to do so.

To clarify and to reassure people, the changes that are being proposed are not changes to our Constitution or to the treaties. They are changes to legislation that was introduced at the time, which specifically focus on how we deploy our troops. Taking on board some of the recommendations from the committee here on pre-legislative scrutiny, I have said that we will clearly define what the missions can be allowed for. They will not be solely for security matters. There has been different language around security and that could be interpreted in a different way. These would have to be peacekeeping missions and that would not impact in any way the role they currently have. This is about changing the way in which they are deployed, not the reason for which they are deployed, nor does it impact our neutrality because in order to change that, we would have to have a referendum to change the Constitution. There have been requests for a referendum in the current context but actually there would be nothing to change, because there is nothing in our Constitution that tells us how we deploy our troops. It just sets out that we cannot join a military alliance. That is what we would be changing if we had a referendum. I am not, nor is anyone here, suggesting for a second that we would change that particular position.