Michael D Higgins (Galway West, Labour)

The Minister of State is somebody for whom I have respect so what I have to say is in no sense personal. However, this is an entirely misleading presentation not the situation. On Friday, there will be a meeting in Rio of the nuclear suppliers group, otherwise known since 1977 as the Club of London. Ireland will be called upon to make up its mind. It will have an opportunity at that meeting, because decisions are taken by way of consensus, to block this agreement.

From what the Minister of State has just said, I put it to him that he is proposing to agree to allow India the same regime as the existing five nuclear powers, France, Britain, China, the United States and Russia. These five nuclear powers have a regime which allows them to nominate certain installations for examination. This is precisely what is on offer to India and it is a stab in the back for the NPT, which the Minister of State correctly describes as one of the most important treaties and which should be aimed at universalisation.

I put it to the Minister of State that what is on offer from India is not membership of the NPT. Will the Minister of State not agree that India does not accept the disciplines of the NPT? Ireland, as a member of the Club of London, where decisions are taken by consensus, is required to vote. Where decisions, which Ireland can block, are taken by consensus, the disciplines are called full scope safeguards. I put it to the Minister of State, then, that to allow the agreement to come into being is the greatest destruction of the NPT that could possibly happen. I also put it to him that it is gross hypocrisy to say that Iran has departed from the safeguard disciplines when Ireland is about to allow a country with no membership of the NPT and no requirement of any discipline whatsoever to agree something that is much lesser.

What Dr. El Baradei has agreed to is not the principle of the agreement, but the concession that has been offered to India, which will allow it to join the five nuclear powers with the same loose arrangement, little less than that. It is a scandalous contradiction of the position taken by Ireland in New York at the New Agenda, when it is widely recognised to be one of the author countries of the NPT. To allow a new country to join five others which have not observed the disciplines of Article 6, to become a new threat, next door to Pakistan, will be the single biggest betrayal of the NPT. To suggest that the NPT can survive after this is quite ridiculous and scandalous. I repeat that the meeting is on Friday, 26 May, in two days' time. To suggest that it is under consideration is misleading this House. By now the Minister of State should know what he should do — I know what the Irish people would want him to do.

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