Sinéad Gibney (Dublin Rathdown, Social Democrats)

In answer to the first of the two questions posed by the Tánaiste, I am aware that, of course, there are other countries that are militarily neutral that do not have a triple lock. However, they did not arrive at their position of neutrality in the same historic pathway as we did with the Nice and Lisbon treaties, simple as that. The other question the Tánaiste asked concerned whether the people of Ireland want those missions to be stopped, which once again brings us into the hypothetical - the “What ifs?” or “Would you?” - and the Minister of State, Deputy Byrne, did exactly the same when we had a debate on this a number of weeks ago. This veto is posed as a "What if?” or "Why are we there?" It seems the Government wishes to justify this massive policy change with no examples of the actual issue arising for peacekeeping. EU missions have received UN mandates before. I mentioned, for example, Operation Sophia and, in that instance, the mandate guaranteed the human rights monitoring and other checks and balances that are vital to missions like these. We pulled out of the UN mission in Syria not due to a lack of mandate but due to a lack of troops. The reason we had that lack of troops was that we committed to a non-UN-backed EU battlegroup that is not accountable to either the European Parliament or the European Court of Human Rights.

If I genuinely believed that we were boxed in in the way the Tánaiste describes, I would be with him on this, but there is no evidence to that effect. That is why I am left asking why we are pivoting away from human rights accountability and transparency in the deployment of our troops and jeopardising our long-held gold standard reputation for peacekeeping.

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