Dáil debates

Tuesday, 9 April 2019

An Bille um an Ochtú Leasú is Tríocha ar an mBunreacht (Neodracht) 2018 : An Dara Céim [Comhaltaí Príobháideacha] - Thirty-Eighth Amendment of the Constitution (Neutrality) Bill 2018: Second Stage [Private Members]

 

10:05 pm

Photo of Jan O'SullivanJan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The policy of the Labour Party is unambiguously to support Ireland’s long-standing policy of military neutrality. By debating this Bill, we have a useful opportunity to restate our perspectives on what Ireland’s neutrality means today. That is perhaps the real purpose of this Bill’s introduction.

I will return to the text of the Bill but I want to first elaborate on the core issue of our military neutrality. Labour's perspective on Ireland's neutrality has a number of dimensions and I would like to focus on three of them: first, Labour's role in the long history of opposition to conscription and violent conflict in Ireland; second, the adequacy of our current defence policy on maintaining military neutrality; and third, the need to redefine neutrality as an active concept that can and should be promoted across Europe and abroad, including as a response to new forms of warfare, as well as a response to conventional warfare.

On the first point, Ireland's people have a long history of rejecting armed conflict as a means to achieve political or economic ends. Ireland adopted neutrality as a policy during the Second World War and that has been maintained as our national policy. However, decades in advance of that, Labour's then leader, Tom Johnson, was a prominent pacifist. Recently, we recalled that he was the primary author of the Democratic Programme of the First Dáil but he also called western Europe's first successful general strike, when he mobilised Ireland's working people against conscription during the First World War. Following the death of Connolly, Johnson became the leader of the labour movement and he and labour associates worked to achieve national independence. Crucially, Johnson was a constitutionalist, guided by the rule of law. When the anti-treaty faction of Sinn Féin refused to recognise the Dáil and the Civil War began, he spoke out against the Army mutiny and in favour of civilian control. This is all relevant to today’s debate because we are talking about the deep roots of Irish people's antipathy to war and violence.

Ireland's working people were mobilised by the labour movement against conscription in the First World War. Labour sought to hold together the fledgling Irish State, and Johnson was the leader of the Opposition in the Dáil for the crucial period of 1922 to 1927, including for all but three months of the Civil War. After that conflict, it was Labour that helped ensure the reintegration of the Civil War enemies into the Dáil, albeit as bitter rivals, and it was ultimately the constitutionalist, civil tradition that won out over violent factionalism in the establishment of this State and its traditions, including our tradition of military neutrality.

On my second point, we have a range of defence policies and relationships in place that respect Ireland’s military neutrality. The triple lock arrangement means the Army will only be deployed when there is a UN mandate, a Government decision and a Dáil vote. Ireland's military neutrality is respected by our EU partners. The Lisbon Treaty has its protocol on the concerns of the Irish people. Among other things, the protocol states that the Treaty of Lisbon does not provide for the creation of a European army or for conscription to any military formation. It will be for member states, including Ireland, acting in a spirit of solidarity and without prejudice to its traditional policy of military neutrality, to determine the nature of aid or assistance to be provided to a member state which is the object of a terrorist attack or the victim of armed aggression on its territory.

Defence spending in Ireland is the lowest in the EU at 0.3% of GDP in 2017, compared to an EU average of 1.3% and spending as high as 1.8% in France or 1.9% in the UK. That is as it should be. We should not be spending a lot of money on defence, although I would like us to spend more when it comes to the pay and conditions of our Defence Forces personnel, many of whom are on shockingly low wages, as Labour has stated many times in this House.

If these policies are currently working to maintain our military neutrality, the question that arises for Sinn Féin is what, if anything, requires us to amend the Constitution at this time. From Labour’s perspective, we do not want the Army involved in warfare. However, Ireland has a proud record of UN peacekeeping where we make a unique contribution. The Army is recognised as having world-class expertise in countering improvised explosive devices. As part of UN peacekeeping work, Ireland has been involved in the destruction of mines, the removal of dangerous chemicals and the destruction of ammunition for small arms in the Balkans and Ukraine. Participation in UN-mandated peacekeeping operations does not challenge our military neutrality.

The third substantive point is that neutrality is not a concept that is fixed in time. There are different traditions of military neutrality around the world and within Europe. Switzerland has a long history of neutrality but it is a form of neutrality underpinned by mandatory military service for its citizens and a convincing military capacity to repel invasion. That is not the type of neutrality we want for Ireland. We want to promote peace and to share our antipathy to the use of violence to achieve political ends. I do not see anything in this Bill that would ensure that Shannon Airport is not used to transport weapons of war, and while I share Sinn Féin's concern that this would not be the case, I cannot find that referred to anywhere in this Bill. We do not want a large military but we do want to be able to defend ourselves adequately, including against terrorism and new forms of warfare such as cyberattacks. That requires us to have some engagement with military alliances to access the technology and shared intelligence we need to protect our citizens.

The proposed legislation seeks to make fundamental changes to our current tradition of military neutrality. The proposed changes to Article 28.3.1° could make it impossible for Ireland to continue to participate in UN peacekeeping missions, as it rules out any participation in armed conflict except to defend the State. The proposed changes would tie the hands of any Government and Dáil if they wanted to offer some assistance of a military nature to another European country that was invaded or suffered a major terrorist attack. If something happened, the proposed text would not only rule out direct involvement in any mission but it would prevent Ireland from taking any action at all, even sharing anti-terrorist intelligence with our European partners. At an extreme, the modified article could also rule out a range of normal civilian co-operation if that co-operation also had a benefit or alternative use for military operations. While I sympathise with the intent behind the Bill, it would appear to promote an isolationist and uncooperative form of neutrality that would not respect our current traditions.

On the proposed additional text for Article 29.3, I agree with adding the text: "Ireland affirms that it is a neutral state". Perhaps it should state "militarily neutral and committed to non-aggression" to spell out exactly what we mean by neutrality in our own context. However, the additional text is more problematic, depending on how it might be interpreted. If the Constitution stated that the State shall "maintain a policy of non-membership of military alliances", would that rule out co-operation on UN-mandated peacekeeping missions if there was NATO involvement or membership of PfP? Could that text even rule out membership of the EU itself? After all, the Union has mutual defence as part of its treaties, even though Ireland has an opt-out in the protocol to the Lisbon treaty. I raise these questions because the Constitution as it stands probably does not need to be amended to maintain our neutrality. This text again would appear to have unintended consequences that would disrupt our existing tradition of military neutrality without any obvious benefit. While Labour, of Ireland's political parties, has unquestionably the longest and clearest commitment to non-violence and military neutrality, there is no necessity, therefore, for a Bill like this to ensure we maintain our military neutrality.

It is utterly dishonest and frankly surreal for the Government, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to declare their commitment to neutrality and then move quickly to stating why they are going to oppose this Bill and defend our current relationship with the evolving European military machine. They do not mention our ongoing complicity with the US war machine. It is a little disappointing to hear a slightly diluted version of the same surreal narrative from the Labour Party, which states that this Bill is not necessary. What about Shannon Airport? That is the reality that blows a hole in the nonsense we just heard from the Government and Fianna Fáil about their commitment to neutrality. Some 2 million US troops have passed through Shannon Airport since the onset of the US-led slaughter in Afghanistan and Iraq. We have facilitated that machine in conducting that slaughter with utterly disastrous consequences and in defiance of any meaningful definition of neutrality.

Members can play around with all the legalistic nonsense they want and try to dissect the Bill in a legalistic way in order to deflect attention from that reality, but they are not going to get away with it. The people of this country do not believe it for one solitary second. They know the reality. They expressed their feelings on that reality when the Irish political establishment facilitated war in Iraq in 2003 by coming out on the streets in unprecedented numbers. That was probably the biggest demonstration that had happened in the State since its foundation. The only demonstrations that even came close to the one that happened on 15 February 2003 were the recent protests against water charge. The numbers were so great that we still do not know how big the demonstrations were. One of the organisers, Mr. Roger Cole, is sitting in the Gallery. He, Mr. Brendan Butler, Mr. Gearoid Kilgallen and I met others several months in advance of a war we knew was going to happen in order to plan those protests for 15 February 2003 in the hope that this demonstration, as part of the global mobilisation that happened on that day, might force the US, Britain and their allies not to proceed with the military assault on Iraq. The world spoke in the biggest demonstration in human history. There has not been a bigger demonstration on a single day before or since. People begged political leaders in this country and across the world not to support or in any way facilitate that military onslaught.

I remember writing an opinion piece for The Irish Times a few weeks before the war started. I quoted some NGOs' estimates of what the casualties of that war would be and wrote that up to 50,000 people might die in Iraq if that war went ahead. As it turned out, more than 1 million people were killed. I ask Members to think about that. This was the absolute destruction of Iraqi society. Some 4 million people were displaced in the worst displacement in human history until the war in Syria. The latter conflict is a direct consequence of the war in 2003. There would be no Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS, if it was not for that war. We facilitated it, we justified it, we defended it and we allowed it to happen.

The NATO military assault on Afghanistan which preceded the 2003 war continues. That occupation is a humanitarian disaster for Afghanistan. That war was justified on the basis that NATO had to respond to the horrific atrocity of 11 September 2001, but the majority of people who carried out that horrific assault were from Saudi Arabia. Last year, Saudi Arabia overtook Russia as the world's third biggest spender on arms after the United States and China. Where does Saudi Arabia get all its weapons? It gets them from Britain, France and our friends in PESCO. Some €1.8 trillion was spent on weapons last year. I invite Members to look at the list of spenders - the United States, China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, India, France, the UK, Japan and Germany. Are these countries with a great history of peacemaking? Come on. These are imperial and sub-imperial powers with a bloody history of using their military power to crush colonial peoples and grab their resources, and to fight savage wars against each other in order to control markets and resources on a global level. That is what we are involved in when we facilitate the US military at Shannon Airport. That is what we are involved in with the Partnership for Peace, whose Orwellian name belies its nature as a structured alignment with the NATO military alliance. It is headed up by precisely those powers who account for two thirds of all global military expenditure, who led the war in Iraq and who led the disastrous assault on Libya that destroyed yet another state. NATO has a first-strike nuclear policy. That means that it will fire nuclear weapons at other countries even if they do not shoot first. That is the policy of NATO. We are now aligned with it through the PfP and the PESCO arrangements, every hand's turn of which is about establishing interoperability between the evolving European military structures and NATO with its bloody history.

Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Labour state that we do not need something in our Constitution to vindicate the views of the majority of people in this country who opposed the use of Shannon Airport for the war to which I refer and who oppose our involvement in military alliances or to vindicate the history of this country, whose neutrality flows from the fact that the State was born in a fight against empire. We need this in our Constitution in order to vindicate that history and the view of the majority of Irish people.

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