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

As the Minister said, we have discussed this before and will certainly discuss it again. We particularly tabled it this time against the backdrop of information released under freedom of information requests to the Minister’s colleagues in the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport, which revealed that last year 272 flights received permits to take weapons or explosives through Shannon Airport, that the majority of flights were taking US troops between military bases and locations in the Middle East and that routinely US troop carriers and aircraft with machine guns, rocket mortars and other war matériel,is transited and flown over our air space. We ask this question because Defence Forces personnel are called out to Shannon to protect some of those aircraft almost daily. Against the backdrop of US involvement in the bombing of the hospital in Kunduz, can the Minister assure us that aircraft was not transited through Shannon?

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