Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)

I oppose the motion. The European Defence Agency, EDA, is about promoting the arms industry. This is not appropriate for any state that is interested in promoting peace. It is certainly not appropriate for a state that claims to be militarily neutral. On any moral ground, we should have nothing to do with a body that was set up for the sole purpose of promoting, developing and expanding the arms industry. Will the Minister or anyone justify the arms industry to me? An obnoxious trade, it is concerned with developing ever more sophisticated means of killing people. It is ironic that Members of the opposite side of the House and members of former Governments often get up on their high horses to denounce violence as being morally obnoxious while supporting Ireland's involvement in an agency whose sole purpose is to assist the companies that specialise in producing lethal weapons.

It is an issue of great concern that the EDA's executive recently told the European Parliament that unmanned drones will be tested in Europe's civilian airspace by 2012. Some of these will be bought from Israel, which has been testing them against Palestinians. According to some estimates, these barbaric instruments have killed as many as 7,000 innocent Afghani men, women and children in horrific bombing raids on villages and towns. It is beyond me why we would have anything to do with an agency or policy that promoted the use of such weapons.

There is no question but that I will oppose the motion. Will the Minister or anyone on the Government side justify support for the arms industry? What is good about it? What possible benefit does it have to humanity and the world? When people are homeless and jobless and lack adequate health and education resources and when there is extraordinary poverty in the world, is it not obscene that Europe and Ireland want to promote an industry that takes resources from those areas humans need to survive and prosper and use them to develop industries designed to produce the means to destroy human life? It is beyond me.

I will oppose the motion strongly. If the Government has any shred of moral sensibility or commitment to the notion of Ireland as a neutral country, we should stand out against the development and expansion of the EDA, which is nothing more than an agency to promote the interests of arms companies that profit from death.

See this speech in context