Clare Daly (Dublin North, United Left) | Oireachtas source

The Minister talks about a non-onerous litigation process when victims who have been prescribed Lariam have to take cases before the court and Dónal de Róiste had to wait 40 years for justice. If the Minister wants to spend money, he should spend it on personnel, not on ever-increasing hardware. It would be far better to do this.

The White Paper and the thoughts we heard earlier are quite unimaginative. We should be standing on its head the idea of a conventional army for Ireland because we do not have the money or the personnel for it. People like Ed Horgan, the peace activist and former Army officer, make some very good points about this. This is a small island on the periphery of Europe. If we were invaded - God knows why we would be - we would not stand a chance. Increasing the military hardware of the Army is not going to improve this. The reality is the only way we could defend ourselves would be in guerrilla warfare or through local resistance, a little like the approach the Swiss take, instead of having a conventional army. In that sense, I welcome the plans to extend the Defence Forces Reserve, which is good as there is no doubt that it has been seriously neglected. Civil Defence should be integrated with the Defence Forces Reserve. That volunteer element is to be welcomed. However, the idea that a separate Air Corps or Naval Service could ever be equipped to be an equal with those in the rest of western Europe is simply laughable.

I would love to have extra time to debate this issue. The Government loves privatisation; it loves selling things off. Let us face it: we have no effective military aircraft and, even if we had, how would we withstand an invasion? We should be concentrating more on rescue-type helicopters which would provide a better air-sea rescue element and a better air ambulance service, particularly in rural areas.

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