Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Bill. Ireland has a long history of neutrality which goes back centuries, to the days of Theobald Wolfe Tone, Daniel O'Connell and James Connolly, who all advocated neutrality for Ireland as a way of protecting the common good and preventing militarism. Historically, small countries have always been sceptical of the intentions of military blocs. In general, historically, military blocs have orientated their military actions to their economic objectives. We cannot escape that with any analysis of history. For example, NATO's involvement in the Middle East is a perfect example of a large military bloc acting on behalf of large countries in large part because of their own economic objectives. Small countries have very little influence on the decisions of large military blocs. If the State aligns itself with a large military bloc, there is no doubt that our young men and women will be involved in their military actions, but we will have precious little influence over the decisions on those military actions.

Much of the debate that is happening at the moment is informed by the shocking experience of Ukraine. I am struck that there is a desire within Fine Gael at the moment not to waste a crisis. There are two elements within Fine Gael policy in the past 30 to 40 years. The first one is federalism. There is an instinct within Fine Gael to push towards a more integrated EU at all stages. We see that at the moment with regard to Fine Gael outsourcing our foreign policy to the EU in many ways. Ireland is afraid to make decisions, for example, on the Russian ambassador, because it says it is waiting for the rest of the EU. The Government says it is not making those decisions because collective decisions are stronger decisions, but there has been no collective decision to remove the Russian ambassadors from European Union member states. I welcome the expulsion of four staff of the Russian embassy yesterday, but it is not enough. The Government must go further than that.

There is also a militaristic instinct within Fine Gael. We saw many of the party's Deputies come out in favour of NATO involvement and also in favour of increased militarism in this State. It is in sharp contrast to the fact that we have Naval Service patrol ships tied up right now in our ports. The EU is investigating Ireland's inability to patrol its own waters. We had to rely on an EU patrol boat for the first time to patrol our waters. Cybersecurity is brought up on a regular basis. If we were serious about this, we would invest in our own defences. Two years ago, the National Cyber Security Centre had a budget of €5 million. The PR spend for the Department of the Taoiseach in the same year was €15 million. One Department spent three times the amount of money on PR than the country spent on its National Cyber Security Centre, which as a result, has cost us approximately €100 million.

There is a necessity for Ireland to be active. We need active neutrality. We have a competency built up from years of peacekeeping, anticolonialism and working against nuclear proliferation and from the fact that missionaries have left this country to help the developing world to develop. As a result, the Irish passport opens doors and minds across the world. We should be using our neutrality, in an active sense, to put pressure on Russia to de-escalate. People might say we would have no influence in that regard, yet how come the Israeli Prime Minister can ring up Vladimir Putin and make an effort at de-escalation? How come President Macron can do that? Why have we outsourced so much of our foreign affairs actions to the European Union? We are reducing our own sovereignty in the name of protecting Ukraine's sovereignty and that does not make sense.

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