Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

This country will not become involved in anyone's adventures anywhere. We do not get involved in adventures. We have a tradition of which we should be proud in the House and which we should never misrepresent of having enormously competent Defence Forces which bring special skills to peacekeeping and which are widely recognised globally. We punch substantially above our weight to deploy small contingents in different parts of the world, often with individual members of the Defence Forces being placed in command of troops from a broad range of countries.

I am very proud of the engagements and the competence of those engagements. I do not want to upset the Deputy but I do not know why people are hung up about NATO. The Cold War was over a long time ago and NATO is effectively a regional organisation that has a substantial role and is recognised by the UN as one of the regional organisations that takes a lead role in peacekeeping and peace enforcement missions, as does its equivalent in the African states and the European Union as an entity. There is an important role to be played in the area.

I do not know if we will participate in the mission because I am waiting for feedback from our defence organisation looking at a range of skills that the UN requested to be incorporated and provided by personnel in the mission. This is an enormously troubled part of the world. The French deserve praise for the speed with which they intervened in circumstances of horrendous atrocities being perpetrated by fundamentalists and al-Qaeda groups in northern Mali. These posed a serious threat to the whole of the country and without the French intervention those groups would have spread further. There are issues with the Malian army because there have been substantial human rights violations by the groups that took over northern Mali and human rights violations by the official Malian forces. These are the subject of investigation at the moment and there is an important role to play to ensure the restructuring of the civil government structure in Mali takes place and that elections take place so that a Government can be democratically elected in July. It is important that there are forces to back the civil power that are competent, are disciplined and trained and do not engage in human rights abuses.

The additional issue in the context of the UN mission is maintaining peace in a troubled area. Even with the engagement of the French, there has been a number of incidents in northern Mali in recent weeks. The conflict will not disappear overnight. We have an international duty to the civilian population to provide it with the protection it requires in a troubled area and a poor country. It needs a great deal more help than simply military help but we should not have turned our backs on the difficulties of the country and the ordinary people in it and, given that this is a European security issue, ignored the difficulties posed to Europe in the medium term had a fundamentalist group entirely taken over Mali, conducted itself in gross violation of the human rights of the population of Mali, planted itself in the country and posed a threat to other countries in the region and to Europe.

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