Réada Cronin (Kildare North, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I again state our objections to the process by which the Tánaiste is seeking approval from the Houses of the Oireachtas for involvement in military missions. This is at a time the people of Ireland want to remain militarily neutral. This is at a time people are traumatised by the high-tech savagery being inflicted on Palestine with the full support of the EU under Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, with more than 17,000 children killed in Gaza, more than 20,000 children missing, buried alive in the rubble of their homes and tens of thousands of children maimed, and the Government is giving its full support to her. Billions of euro are spent on bombs shredding children in tents while we put a snas on their famous European values.

We have previously taken the Tánaiste to task on allowing only the bare minimum of debate that is mandated constitutionally or legislatively on these matters. He did not even have time to read out his full speech and needed extra time. That is the respect that is shown here.

Last July, the Government sought agreement for four European Defence Agency projects allowing only 55 minutes of Dáil debate, with a single vote on all four. Last July, it also rejected Sinn Féin's amendment that the Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence be allowed to fully scrutinise the projects. This week the Tánaiste brought his proposals to the select committee again in a pre-emptive and closed manner. The committee could have had a wider discussion and canvassed expert and civic opinion from outside. Instead, we are being asked to examine UN peacekeeping at a time when those missions are more crucial than ever and at the same time as two PESCO missions and two separate EDA projects. The recklessness and carelessness here are just incredible.

The matter of the Tánaiste's approving observer status of missions without Dáil approval is related. None of this is good legislative practice. Instead, we need an agreed framework to allow examination and discussion. It is hard to believe we are being asked to sign off on international military matters at such a tense time in such a cavalier manner.

Irish people are rightly proud of the contribution that our Defence Forces have made to international peacekeeping through the various continuing deployments since the first time in 1958. As we reflect on their contributions to United Nations missions in 2023, we must also recognise the heightened and risky security context in which many of them are operating in Lebanon. Their peacekeeping service is something unique in our society and our public life, which is why we owe them and their families a particular duty of care involving the framework within which they operate and are deployed. We must minimise risk for them and maximise their peacekeeping impacts where they are stationed. Looking after them means their pay and conditions must be fair. They must have the equipment needed to meet their obligations. Equally those who sign up to put themselves in harm's way for the State must have the absolute guarantee that no harm will come to them in their own ranks.

The Government is failing on each and every one of these duties to our Defence Forces. It requires some neck to justify abandoning the triple lock protection of our neutrality by referring to the report of the chair of the so-called consultative forum. That same report found that a considerable majority of those who spoke or wrote on the topic expressed the view that there was no public appetite for a change to the current position of neutrality. There is no appetite for a change in our military neutrality, yet the Tánaiste chances his arm and force feeds it to the people with a coterie that will always be well protected from the impacts of war and fighting. It is the UN mandate that gives legitimacy to international peacekeeping missions. Not only does the Tánaiste have no mandate to remove the triple lock but he has also been campaigning and promising on its necessity for decades. No matter how often he says it, it is nonsense that we must abandon the triple lock out of fear of a veto by Russia or China at the UN Security Council.

On top of that, the only reason our troops are not peacekeeping on the Golan Heights today is he chose to withdraw them. We in here and the people out there know the reason had nothing to do with consolidation, as he said, and everything to do with shoring up numbers to take part in the EU battle group as if the EU, under Ursula von der Leyen, is not wreaking enough havoc in Gaza.

Having deprioritised UN peacekeeping missions, the Tánaiste now has his sights firmly set on removing the prerequisite for a UN mandate for overseas deployments entirely. My party is clear on this. If the Tánaiste wishes to carry on as he is, he should put his proposals to the people in a referendum. In any event it is scandalous that the Tánaiste should be forced to choose only one or two deployments consisting of 100 or 200 personnel.

The reason is clear: the crisis in retention and recruitment. We have only 7,500 personnel in the Defence Forces versus the level of ambition 2 target of 11,500. The Government may have inherited the crisis but it has worsened in its tenure with more leaving than joining every year. There has been a €70 million shortfall in the capital investment required to attain level of ambition 2 each year since the report of the Commission on the Defence Forces was published. This has real world consequences, such as missed patrol days at home and in this year the full withdrawal from a mission on which Irish personnel had served for more than a decade.

In 2023, we saw 1,538 Defence Forces personnel serve overseas on UN peacekeeping missions, more than 100 fewer than in 2019 despite an utterly changed and deteriorated security context. Assuming no further new deployments, it means our UN peacekeeping contribution by the end of this year will have effectively decreased by more than 25% since 2019 levels and by up to one third by next year when no continued deployments as part of UNDOF are factored in.

Sinn Féin supports the deployment of Irish troops as part of UN-mandated peacekeeping missions. We are extremely proud of them. Yesterday we spoke about Private John Rooney - ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam. However, we do not support the Tánaiste's deprioritisation of those missions or his seeking to remove important protections governing those deployments. The UN mandate protects all our Defence Forces personnel abroad; the war games coterie in industry and academia will not.

The Tánaiste's case that we should join PESCO and the European Defence Agency's forays is weak. He does not have Sinn Féin's support. His justification yesterday at the defence committee was light and failed even to develop on the supposed benefits accrued while already an observer in one mission. It is the function of the Oireachtas to hold Government to account when necessary and to grant approval to certain proposed measures not to simply rubber-stamp them. Since a rubber-stamp is what he seeks today, our answer is "No".

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