Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to take part in this discussion. I note the report highlights a "paucity of real debate on defence and security matters in [the] country" and that the commission "hopes...a more informed and grounded debate on these matters" will arise from it. I echo that but I will take it further in that there is a complete absence of a debate on grounding any talk about defence and increasing our military spending within the values we treasure and the articles of the Constitution that commit us to being a country that works for peace, not a country that puts it hand up to be the best in the warmongering class. I would prefer our debate to take place on how we become the best country in the peacekeeping class as a neutral country.

The Minister has left the Chamber. I understand he cannot be here all the time, but he posed the question - had we read the report? I can tell him I have read the entire report of approximately 250 pages. It raises many things - I have only four minutes and will not go into them - and there are 11 chapters. There are four sections in chapter 8 that deal with people, such is their value as the Defence Force's "key strategic resource". The one thing any government at any stage has not done is to treasure our people in the Defence Forces as the key strategic resource. As has been mentioned, terms and conditions were not under the commission's terms of reference. I will leave that at present.

Among many things the report highlighted were a serious "sense of crisis", a serious sense by those on the ground of not being heard, "a serious desire for change at all levels", "a disconnect between stated policy, resources and capabilities", an "inadequacy of...grievance processes", fears of reprisal, disempowerment and evidence across the Defence Forces of a culture that is masculine and has "a limited appreciation of diversity". The Women of Honour group gets a very small reference in the report, on page 100, which is interesting. I pay tribute to the amount of work done by the commission's 16 members and the speed of it, given the amount of time. The report is laid out very clearly.

I come from Galway city, where there was a little celebration last week, as the Minister of State well knows, to mark the handing over of the Dún Uí Mhaoilíosa barracks 100 years ago. Ireland joined the League of Nations the following year. That was a doomed organisation but it had very good ambitions, including disarmament, preventing war, settling disputes by peaceful means and improving global welfare. In today's terms, we talk about getting rid of inequality as the major way to stop war. That was approximately 100 years ago. That organisation was doomed but we moved forward and joined the UN in 1955. As has been said, since 1958 we have an unbroken record of service in UN peacekeeping forces. As Clare Daly put it in her submission to the commission, we have served in more than 20 peacekeeping operations. It has been a lot more than that but we have been somewhere every single day of the year since 1958. I will highlight the submissions to the commission from the Quakers, Clare Daly, the World Beyond War organisation and the Peace and Neutrality Alliance. They are worth looking at because they lift the debate out of the definite necessities of tackling the retention crisis in the Army to consider the sole purpose of our Army. What is it for? How do we achieve that?

Before I give any endorsement to the billions that have been mentioned, I would like a frank and honest discussion of the role of our Defence Forces. To consider the United Nations, Denis Halliday has been quoted in one of the submissions as saying that our "reputation for integrity and decency and doing a good job" is second to none. Dr. Michael Ryan from the World Health Organization, a man we quoted ad nauseamwhen it suited us in respect of Covid, in his address at the Trócaire Oscar Romero awards ceremony, "warned against the enormous waste of global defence investment urging nations to radically change the mindset ... on [the] imagined threats from other nations".

The real threat is climate change. It barely gets a mention in the report and only in terms of the consequences of environmental degradation. On page 5, the report states that the risk of attack is very low yet we are talking about putting billions of euro into an army in order that we can be the best boys and girls, put our hands up and say we are top of the warmongering class, as opposed to the peacekeeping class.

See this speech in context