Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I hope that will be possible. If not, we will have a long debate on this in September and October. These are important issues. They will not go away. They will be as significant in September as they are now. This is not a party political issue and it should not be seen as something that needs an instant debate. These issues will not go away. The security landscape on our Continent is, unfortunately, changing because of raw aggression and brutality in the east, coming from Russia into Ukraine. That is changing how every country in the European Union views security and defence capacity and the partnerships that they need. I have had this debate with Finnish and Swedish Ministers at length over the past ten years. The support for joining NATO in Finland was consistently between 20% and 25% for decades, but people feel a threat to their own security right now, which has understandably changed that perspective. If we were geographically located where Finland is, I believe we would be having the same debate. We would not be talking about the ideology of neutrality and so on.

We are fortunate about where we happen to be on the planet. We have natural protection, given where we are, with the Atlantic on one side and the United Kingdom on the other. We do not have many natural enemies, at least in a conventional way, from a security and military perspective. We face threats, as we have seen with cybersecurity issues and so on. This is not a debate about neutrality. It is a debate about the resourcing of our Defence Forces and how we can enhance that with opportunities to operate with other countries that have also voluntarily opted in to these projects in order that we can work together to make sure our troops are safer when they are abroad and we have a better skill set for responding to what is asked of them. To refer to neutrality in a way that suggests we should not work with other friendly countries which we are working with on all sorts of other matters to enhance our capacity and skill set is, to my mind, extraordinary.

Incidentally, I still do not know whether Sinn Féin is supporting these PESCO projects. If Sinn Féin supports the Defence Forces, then it should consider that they want these projects. They feel safer on the back of doing them There is an idea that we should not be involved in a project that is about cyberthreats and incident response information, with a sharing platform with three or four other countries, and training and working with other countries to ensure we are better prepared for disaster relief. If, God forbid, there was a natural disaster in North Africa today that killed thousands of people, Deputies would all be calling on me to respond, just like people responded positively when we sent a ship to the Mediterranean to respond to the plight of migrants there. We can train with other countries to make sure that we have the capacity to do that and we choose to do it ourselves.

On the special operations forces medical training centre, Army Ranger Wing personnel are in Mali as we speak on a complex, difficult mission. The idea that we would not offer them the opportunity to improve medical training capacity is extraordinary. Tying that up in an ideological debate on neutrality is just not where this should be.

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