Ciarán Cuffe (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party)

This agreement is about more than the sharing of airline data. It is a fundamental disagreement between the old world and the new world. The last five years have shown clearly the differences of opinion between both sides of the Atlantic and within countries on this side of the Atlantic. A clear message has come from Washington — you are either with us or against us. It is crucial that we seek the common ground in the dynamics of world reaction rather than increase the polarisation of the debate.

One cannot bring peace to this world by initiating a war on terror. One cannot bring peace to developing countries by bombing them back into the Stone Age. One cannot bring peace by spending more on armaments than on Africa. We are discussing kowtowing to Washington rather than allowing Europe to develop its own voice. Ireland is at the crossroads in this and there is a significant onus on our foreign policy and our reaction to this proposal to say we should not meekly bow down to what the United States wants. We should say it may not be appropriate to give the United States the huge amount of data it seeks. I am concerned that we will have to give details of people's credit card records to the US authorities if they wish to travel there. I worry about where this ends — criminal records, credit card details, next we will have to give information on penalty points. We must strongly and carefully point out the difficulty in contributing to this frenzy on which the US has embarked in its war on terror. There are many great aspects to the United States of which its can-do attitude, its dynamism and its assistance in times of need are examples. However, when it comes to sharing the minutiae of passenger information I worry that the US is subsuming this data into an enormous expenditure on what it believes will protect its citizens. I am not convinced.

If the US were to spend even a small fraction of what has been spent on the war on terror over the last five years we could be well on our way to solving many of the problems of developing countries. If we spent a small fraction of that money on nutrition, health, education and clean water we could achieve so much more than dropping the equivalent of millions of tonnes of TNT on Afghanistan or Iraq. We must face up to the United States on this. I speak as a citizen of both Ireland and the US because there has been a major polarisation in the US. President Bush has not brought the United States in the right direction and a majority, which is no longer silent, wants to see a process of engagement with the developing world rather than pushing into this war on terror. For these reasons, and many others, we should oppose this proposal.

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