Results 1-20 of 1,057 for speaker:Tom Clonan

Seanad: Nithe i dtosach suíonna - Commencement Matters: Further and Higher Education (3 Jul 2025)

Tom Clonan: I thank the Minister of State for attending this morning to hear this Commencement matter. A new professional doctorate in educational psychology will commence in September and the Government has very generously made available a bursary of €40,000 per student at taxpayers' expense. I do not know if it is generally understood in Cabinet that this course will only qualify its graduates...

Seanad: Nithe i dtosach suíonna - Commencement Matters: Further and Higher Education (3 Jul 2025)

Tom Clonan: NEPS is a great service and it absolutely needs to recruit educational psychologists, but this method is tailoring a doctoral training course to be specific to the needs of NEPS to the exclusion of all the other areas where the need is more acute while children are going into psychological distress for want of a brief intervention. Some of those children go on to develop serious issues and...

Seanad: Health (Scoliosis Treatment Services) Bill 2024: Report and Final Stages (2 Jul 2025)

Tom Clonan: I welcome the Minister. It is great to see her here in the context of this Bill not being opposed, for which we are very grateful. I commend my colleague Senator McDowell on his drafting of the legislation. I thank my colleagues in the Independent Group and others who cosponsored it. The Bill deals with an issue that is very personal to me because of my family circumstances. The...

Seanad: Domestic Violence (Amendment) Bill 2024: Committee Stage (2 Jul 2025)

Tom Clonan: Well said.

Seanad: Domestic Violence (Amendment) Bill 2024: Committee Stage (2 Jul 2025)

Tom Clonan: I support Senator Ryan and the amendment she has brought forward. It is a reminder of how intimate gender-based violence is and how the family is often the locus of this type of gender-based violence in our society. We have a serious endemic and persistent problem with gender-based violence. This struck me as I listened to the Senator. I grew up in a matriarchal household with three...

Seanad: Domestic Violence (Amendment) Bill 2024: Committee Stage (2 Jul 2025)

Tom Clonan: Hear, hear.

Seanad: Domestic Violence (Amendment) Bill 2024: Committee Stage (2 Jul 2025)

Tom Clonan: I thank cross-party colleagues for restoring this Bill to the Order Paper. In regard to what Senator Stephenson said, there is a fetishisation of violence against women in our public discourse. It is in popular culture, literature, film and in particular online. It is a very powerful recurring narrative and it is a construct of a patriarchal society. Senator Stephenson spoke to some of...

Seanad: An tOrd Gnó - Order of Business (1 Jul 2025)

Tom Clonan: I raise the appalling vista last week in Washington DC, where 34 disabled protestors were arrested by Capitol Hill police. Many of these wheelchair users were manhandled, handcuffed and zip tied as they protested against cuts proposed by Trump's Congress to the Medicaid programme, which would affect disabled American citizens. Disabled citizens being manhandled and having their hands tied...

Committee on Defence and National Security: General Scheme of the Defence (Amendment) Bill 2025: Discussion (Resumed) (1 Jul 2025)

Tom Clonan: I welcome our esteemed witnesses. I have served with all of them, at the Chief of Staff's branch and overseas. I learned so much under Colonel Doyle's command. It was on his watch that we had the first ever visit by a Taoiseach to Irish troops overseas, following an initiative and direction from the colonel. I commend him. It is great to see him looking so well. We are driving the...

Committee on Defence and National Security: General Scheme of the Defence (Amendment) Bill 2025: Discussion (Resumed) (1 Jul 2025)

Tom Clonan: The unanimous response would appear to be that the majority of, if not all, potential future missions, outside of a triple lock or a UN Security Council resolution, will be warfighting.

Committee on Defence and National Security: General Scheme of the Defence (Amendment) Bill 2025: Discussion (Resumed) (1 Jul 2025)

Tom Clonan: As defence intellectuals, however, we know that peace enforcement and warfighting are the same thing.

Committee on Defence and National Security: General Scheme of the Defence (Amendment) Bill 2025: Discussion (Resumed) (1 Jul 2025)

Tom Clonan: With respect, the literature shows that they are one and the same thing, because of the use of force. I will come back to Dr. Berry later. What is the maximum formation that Ireland can meaningfully deploy overseas at the moment? Is it a platoon, a company or a brigade? We are very short on time so a one-sentence reply will suffice.

Committee on Defence and National Security: General Scheme of the Defence (Amendment) Bill 2025: Discussion (Resumed) (1 Jul 2025)

Tom Clonan: So a battalion is four hundred and-----

Committee on Defence and National Security: General Scheme of the Defence (Amendment) Bill 2025: Discussion (Resumed) (1 Jul 2025)

Tom Clonan: My question is very specific. What is the maximum formation that we can deploy meaningfully without support from other nations? Is it a company?

Committee on Defence and National Security: General Scheme of the Defence (Amendment) Bill 2025: Discussion (Resumed) (1 Jul 2025)

Tom Clonan: Okay. If it is a company-plus or a battalion-minus, is it not the case that in a peace enforcement or war-fighting context such a unit would inexorably and organically be under the command of another nation? It could not operate independently.

Committee on Defence and National Security: General Scheme of the Defence (Amendment) Bill 2025: Discussion (Resumed) (1 Jul 2025)

Tom Clonan: Understood. My final question is in relation to this issue of the 12. The Department of Defence confirmed to us a number of weeks ago that this upper limit of 12 does not apply to situations of force majeure where, for example, we have to evacuate Irish citizens from abroad, or if we were to provide aid to the civil authority of our neighbours in the UK or in Northern Ireland if it had...

Committee on Defence and National Security: General Scheme of the Defence (Amendment) Bill 2025: Discussion (Resumed) (1 Jul 2025)

Tom Clonan: The triple lock, therefore, does not place any inhibition on us and our sovereign decision to assist a neighbour when they are in extremis.

Committee on Defence and National Security: General Scheme of the Defence (Amendment) Bill 2025: Discussion (Resumed) (1 Jul 2025)

Tom Clonan: That is what the Department of Defence clarified. It said that if we need to get citizens out of Sudan, Kabul, Tehran or wherever, the upper limit of 12 does not apply and the triple lock actually has nothing to do with that.

Committee on Defence and National Security: General Scheme of the Defence (Amendment) Bill 2025: Discussion (Resumed) (1 Jul 2025)

Tom Clonan: I am just saying that because to invoke it as a reason to dispense with the triple lock is actually a red herring. I did not hear all of the contributions because, unfortunately, I had a constituent who was in crisis. I did catch the end of some remarks where there was a suggestion that the upper limit of 12 would have an impact on the number of people we could put in an aircraft or the...

Committee on Defence and National Security: General Scheme of the Defence (Amendment) Bill 2025: Discussion (Resumed) (1 Jul 2025)

Tom Clonan: I am equally surprised by it. In fact, I would have raised it to 120. The number of 50 seems quite arbitrary.