Sinéad Gibney (Dublin Rathdown, Social Democrats)

No one is denying the difficulties of the Security Council but the Tánaiste has given no effort to actually describe how the General Assembly could be engaged to fall back. It is in the Defence (Amendment) Act 2006. It is part of the triple lock and the Tánaiste is completely ignoring it. Constantly referencing other countries denies our history. It denies the Nice and Lisbon treaties and how we arrived at the point of the triple lock. Beside that, our association with UN mandates was way before then anyway. One cannot compare it to other countries like that. We can say that something is consistent with the UN Charter until we are blue in the face but the charter is clear around the use of force without consent and the backing of the United Nations. Everyone claims to go to war for peace, love, security and human rights but we have seen in the last 25 years how hollow those words can be. UN backing guarantees that peacekeeping missions are of high quality and that the operational parameters do not do more harm than good. We cannot send young men and women abroad into conflict zones with no blue beret and with no safeguard beyond what the Government of any given day thinks is a good idea.

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