Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The people are sovereign through our electoral system and that is where sovereignty must reside.

Another myth that Sinn Féin and other supporters of this Bill peddle is that of increasing militarisation. The truth is that all over Europe, military expenditure has declined rapidly in the 20 years after 1989. Now events in Ukraine may reverse that in some countries where the important issue of the violation of sovereignty arises. Here in Ireland we have reduced our Defence Forces from around 14,000 in 1990 to fewer than 10,000. I hope that number can increase again to 10,000. In the ten years after 1997, defence spending in this country halved as a share of gross domestic product, GDP. In the era known as the Troubles we had a very substantial expenditure on defence and security due to the atrocities carried out by paramilitary organisations and the needless loss of thousands of innocent lives. Fortunately, we have been able to reduce those security and financial demands and the need to put in place security along the Border.

This Bill would represent a backward step. It would not do anything to enhance the protection of military neutrality that is already there and I restate my party's opposition to it. We did not support a similar Bill proposed by Sinn Féin while we were in government in 2003 and we will not do so now.

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