Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I would like to see the Security Council reformed. I have said this at the Security Council, at the Munich security conference at the G20 last week. The Security Council urgently needs to be reformed but I cannot imagine Putin or others being open to this. We have to deal with the reality of a Security Council that in my view does not function the way it should and is badly in need of reform. I do not want anybody other than the directly elected people's representatives to have a veto on where our peacekeeping troops go. How we do this, how we get the legislation right and what a new mechanism to safeguard our neutrality would look like are things on which I am eager to engage constructively with Members of the House. My starting point in the debate is that the UN Security Council permanent members should not have a veto on where I as Minister for Defence and the democratically elected Government of Ireland wish to send our peacekeeping troops. There have been examples in the past, and I can go through them in the reply to the supplementary question, when this has impacted and impeded our ability. People in Ireland understand this.

They want Irish Government officials, not Vladimir Putin, deciding where our peacekeepers go.

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