Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I will begin by answering Deputy Pringle. I absolutely believe we should publish the recommendations and bring them back for debate in this Chamber. I agree with what Deputy Ó Cuív said earlier, which is that this Chamber is the pre-eminent citizens' assembly for our country, democratically elected and constitutionally mandated. We should and will be centre stage in discussing any policy in regard to our country’s future military or other foreign policy initiatives. I look forward to our party’s proud participation in that. We come from a long tradition of democratic peaceful politics and it is in that tradition over recent years that we have been working through our policy council, made up of representatives of our party from all over of the country, and have been looking at this critical issue.

We, as a party, say that Ireland is committed, as is our party, to retaining Ireland’s commitment to active military neutrality. We are completely committed to the continuing involvement in the EU’s common security and defence policy but subject to our special status, including participation in the Permanent Structured Cooperation, PESCO, in the Coordinated Annual Review on Defence, and in the Partnership for Peace, but we are opposed and will continue to resist any activities not compatible with the State's non-aligned and peacekeeping defence tradition. The Green Party and I reaffirm our opposition to joining NATO. We go back to that Nice referendum, which the Irish people endorsed back in 2002, where with the first Article on that issue in the Seville Declaration of the Nice treaty, states that:

Ireland reaffirms its attachment to the aims and principles of Charter of the United Nations, which confers primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security upon the United Nations Security Council.

As Deputy Ó Cuív put eloquently, those international judicial peacekeeping mechanisms are in our tradition and go right back to the foundation of this State, so we completely support it.

The Seville Declaration also states, in Article 5, "that any decision by the Union to move to a common defence would have to be taken by unanimous decision of the Member States and adopted in accordance with their respective constitutional requirements." This means that we would have to have a referendum in this country for any such decision to join a common defence which we do not want to do. Our party would argue in opposition to that in any such referendum.

The Nice treaty declaration also states that the participation of contingents of the Irish Defence Forces in overseas operations, including those carried out under the European security and defence policy, requires the authorisation of the operation by the Security Council or the General Assembly of the United Nations, the agreement of the Irish Government and the approval of Dáil Éireann.

As Deputy Pringle said himself, that first condition, the requirement for a UN mandate, is not legally binding but it does have real drawbacks. The figures I have show that since 1946 there have been 251 public vetoes since the Security Council's inception, with 238 of them between 1946 and 1990. As the Deputy said, the United States of America and the USSR or Russia account for 185 of those. France, by contrast, only used its veto 18 times. It is a real issue here now. We do have an issue within our United Nations peacekeeping institutional structures-----

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