Martin Mansergh (Fianna Fail)

I welcome this Bill. It is an example of legislation which implements EU directives that have a relatively limited applicability to Ireland, in this case because we are not involved in any serious way in the arms industry. There is more than one dimension to this issue. When such legislation was considered 20 years ago, it was generally looked at solely from the perspective of Irish neutrality and our wish not to be involved, preferably even indirectly, in the arms trade.

In reality, some of the equipment produced in Ireland, by multinationals in particular, has multiple uses, and it is difficult to impose controls in this regard. If we want multinationals to come here, we must, within limits, be pragmatic. I have no problem whatsoever with the type of manufacture mentioned in this debate. Timoney armoured cars, for instance, have a role in peacekeeping. We must recognise that there are many legitimate contexts for the use of force, including UN peacekeeping.

The worrying dimension to this issue is that there are some states who are arguably trying to engage in the internationally illicit production of certain types of arms, nuclear weapons being the most obvious example. Even more worryingly, not all the international players are necessarily states. Various non-state groups have uses for arms. One could argue that much if not most of the violence in the world today is caused not by inter-state conflict but by various non-state groups operating across frontiers. We must guard against being unwittingly involved in such activity.

I entirely agree that the Iraq war is an object lesson in the limitations of the use of force even where initial military victory can be achieved relatively simply. I hope future leaders, particularly among our friends and partners but elsewhere as well, will relinquish the notion that it is politically advantageous to engage in foreign wars. At the end of Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 2, a royal brother, in conversation with the chief justice, talks about the king engaging in foreign wars as a distraction from domestic problems. Unfortunately that is not peculiar to the 15th century but happens in the 21st.

Can anybody honestly say that, had they foreseen the consequences of the invasion of Iraq, which we know was based on largely spurious grounds, they would have entertained that adventure? There is a lot to be said for the wisdom of President Bush senior in 1991 when the invasion of Kuwait had to be confronted. Nevertheless, the coalition stopped short at a certain point. Tony Blair is coming to the end of his career as British Prime Minister and we have reason in this country to be extremely grateful for his contribution. His achievements also include devolution for Scotland and Wales but it is a great pity that his historical reputation is likely to be marred and overshadowed by the adventure in Iraq.

It reflects well on the wisdom of Irish foreign policy and that of the European Union as a whole, though individual states have engaged in the coalition of the willing, that the emphasis is on political and economic solutions. One can never exclude the use of force as a last resort in certain situations, such as in the former Yugoslavia, but it should be a last resort rather than an option based on the belief, prevalent in some sections of the political establishment across the Atlantic, that if one has superior force, one must use it. I hope there will be a return to a more internationalist approach in which force is only used where there is unequivocal justification for it, rather than with a view to redrawing the map of the Middle East ideologically. I do not know how many people over the centuries have succumbed to the snares and delusions of that policy. They believe they are free to do so and will not meet any resistance but war is no more certain than a horse race. Unpredictable things happen which blow people completely off course.

This piece of legislation is fairly and squarely within our traditions and those of the EU, whose ethos and spirit are not far removed from our own. I accept that other overlapping organisations have a different ethos.