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

There will always be incidents that test our systems and capacity. Last year, we were talking about our experience of getting people out of Kabul. People were rightly raising the question of whether we have a medium-range lift capacity in our Defence Forces which would enable them to take people out of a part of the world where we need to get people out quickly, and what we are doing about that. Now we are being asked what our capacity is in terms of monitoring subsea cables, and what we are doing about that. We will also have questions around our capacity in peacekeeping missions in different parts of the world if we are going to move to chapter VII rather than chapter VI missions, which the UN will certainly ask of us, and what we are doing about that in terms of equipment and training. We need to see this as a challenge that we can only respond to over a number of years. That means investing more in defence and being unapologetic and transparent about what that means, rather than pretending that somehow a neutral country does not have to invest in defence or that if there is a conference on technology and military equipment taking place in Ireland, all of a sudden it is somehow some kind of arms conference. It is not. It is about Ireland having a conversation about how we apply the technology and equipment that we need to be able to do all these things in terms of the investment programmes that we have for the Irish Defence Forces in order that they can do their job efficiently in the future.

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