Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

It feels like hardly a week passes without the Dáil being asked to approve some fresh assault on our neutrality and I am absolutely sick of it. The motion before us might not be the worst of them but certainly the one we debated earlier was among the worst. We cannot see the present motion in isolation. Earlier, we heard that the Government has let the Irish State be bullied into signing up to an EU status of forces agreement, SOFA, for no good reason at all. Basically the Germans told us that we could not play in their battle group in 2020 if we did not sign up to an EU SOFA. Rather than telling them that is grand, we are a neutral country and we do not want to play, the Government came in here to relay the Germans' instructions as if they were commandments carved on a stone tablet. We have a responsibility to say they are not. We no more need to be part of an EU SOFA than we need to take part in a German battle group. We have heard a lot from the Minister of State and he was at it again earlier, talking about interoperability of our Defence Forces and other countries' armies as if that was some sort of a given that nobody could question. It is not. We do not need to be interoperable with German forces if all we take part in are peacekeeping missions. The only reason we would need to be interoperable with the German army or any other army is if one day we plan to go to war alongside them.

Things must be pretty bad in this House, going by the discussion that took place at the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Defence on 24 January. I never thought I would be in the Chamber quoting Deputy Barrett, that is, Seán Barrett and not Richard Boyd Barrett. Deputy Seán Barrett is a former Fine Gael Minister for Defence. At the committee last week, he said:

I ask that we revert back to what we were the best at, namely, peacekeeping. We do not want all of this. Leave it to others, if they want to become part and parcel of battle groups. Battle groups are not peacekeepers. The words "battle groups" mean that they are trained to go into battle. Do we want to be part of the battle groups? Since when do peacekeepers become involved in battle groups? With the greatest respect, we are losing our way here.

I agree 100% with that statement. Something clearly has happened since the 1990s and things have changed in a very big way. There was a turning point around the Iraq war and against the backdrop of the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. We saw the use of Shannon Airport on a consistent basis by the US military. That change has accelerated massively in the recent past and we have had a parade of vanity projects, very embarrassing militaristic posturing to the hawks in the EU, whether it is battle groups or our navy shamefully taking part in a military operation against desperate refugees. Nobody has told the Labour Party about that as they seem to think it is something to save them.

I find it hard to believe that anybody who grew up in this country could really be so misguided as to think that the economic benefits of war outweigh the devastation it causes. That was almost the conclusion of the paper the Minister of State cited by his colleague, Mr. Brian Hayes, MEP. What was that other than a kite-flying mission. Fine Gael could not do it itself and did not want to be embarrassed by it but it could throw it out there in the names of a bunch of unknowns of whom no-one ever heard to see how much it was flagged. That was the intent of that paper. That is the direction that those at the top of the present Defence Forces seem to be taking and I think it is toxic. We have to stop this rot and part of that job is to stop the efforts of this Government almost weekly to normalise the gutting of our neutrality. That is what we have here. More than 60,000 troops going through Shannon last year is not normal. It is not normal for Ireland to buy a navy warship. Battle groups are not normal. Going to war at sea against defenceless migrants is not normal. None of it is normal and I think the Irish public agrees with that. We should be standing lock, stock and barrel against any further interaction in European defence policy and should stand up once and for all for Irish neutrality.

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