Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael)

I assure the Deputy that is the case. I mentioned earlier that we have up to 850 members of the Defence Forces who could be deployed abroad. I was merely making the case that as we have in excess of 450 in Lebanon, we do not have the capacity to send a similar large number abroad. Clearly, if we receive a request from the United Nations to participate in other missions or to deploy small numbers of members of the Defence Forces in circumstances where there is a real contribution to be made to peacekeeping or peace enforcement, the Government retains an open mind on such deployments and does not rule them out as a possibility.

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