Maurice Cummins (Fine Gael)

I welcome the Minister to the House. I agree with Senator Norris with regard to the re-ordering of the business of the House. It is regrettable that as the proposer of the motion, he was not informed the Order of Business had been changed.

Cluster bombs are an abomination. They pose a particular risk to civilians and often to children because, as their name suggests, they leave large numbers of dangerous explosive devices spread across the landscape. They can remain live and dangerous for decades after they have been launched, killing not only the generation of people alive when the bomb is dropped but also their children and even their grandchildren.

The dangers of one cluster bomb can be seen in a simple statistic. The footprint of a single cluster bomb can be as large as a football pitch. In the words of Handicap International, which has campaigned against these weapons, "Ninety-eight percent of cluster submunitions casualties are civilians killed and injured while returning home in the aftermath of conflict or while going about their daily tasks to survive."

Its comments on the use of these weapons are blunt:

Despite a general lack of information on casualties both during and after strikes, it is clear unexploded cluster submunitions turn homes, livelihoods and social areas of almost 400 million people living in affected countries into de facto minefields. A total of 13,306 casualties due to cluster submunitions are confirmed. However, as 96% of casualties occur in countries where there is no or limited data collection, there are undoubtedly more casualties. In high-use locations, such as Iraq there were more than 1,000 casualties during strikes.

The fact that it is often people who have survived brutal conflicts and are returning home thinking they are safe who end up injured or killed by these weapons adds a particular horror to their use. In Kosovo, 53% of casualties occurred in the two months after the conflict. Most of the victims killed or maimed were boys aged between five and 15.

It is not only the age of the victims of these abominable weapons that is shocking. We see these weapons targeted specifically at the poor for it is often their farmlands which are littered with the bombs which, like landmines, are spread all over the place. However, the poor have no choice but to return to their farms and to try to live there, in the process spending every day worrying that when they plough the land, herd their cattle or travel to their homes they may step on an unexploded bomb left by the clustered explosion and lose an arm or leg or perhaps their lives. Every day they face the fear that their children may never come home from school, yet another victim of an unexploded remnant of a cluster bomb.

I quote again from Handicap International which has done major work to highlight the evil of cluster bombs.

The majority of victims are poor, uneducated males at work representing 76.8% of total confirmed casualties. Many of these are boys under the age of 18. In South Lebanon, nearly 90% of land used for farming and shepherding is contaminated with unexploded cluster submunitions.

Like many modern weapons, cluster munitions owe their origins to the Second World War when they were used indiscriminately. Remarkably, since the mid-1960s they seem to have been targeted against civilians in many areas. They are not merely a weapon to win wars. They are a weapon used to terrorise communities, to lay waste large tracts of land and to hit the poor in particular.

In Kosovo, cluster bombs were used by NATO without a deployment of NATO troops. In May 1995, the Croatian capital, Zagreb, was targeted deliberately by Serb forces with cluster bombs among other weapons. One Serb general made no secret of his tactics. He told the press that if the Croats launched an offensive, he would attack weak points. He stated with regard to Zagreb, "We know who the people in the parks are: civilians." One bomb fired contained 288 bomblets, each of which on explosion released 420 steel pellets, with a kill range of 10 metres. In other words, each rocket released 120,000 pellets, designed deliberately to kill people not only when the bomblets were released but indefinitely into the future.

In Vietnam, decades after the end of the Vietnam war, 300 people per year are still being killed by cluster bombs and landmines. People died for years after 1,400 cluster bombs were dropped in Kosovo. In 2000, the BBC reported the American cluster bombs, whether by accident or design, were visually appealing to children when they found them due to their bright yellow colour. However, in the BBC's words, "they contain an incendiary device — shrapnel — and armour piercing explosive that can pierce steel 25 cm thick".

This is why my party is passionately opposed to the use of cluster bombs. Defence can sometimes be necessary. However, creating weapons specifically to kill civilians — innocent men, women and children — for decades after a war is over can never be justified. One of the Council of Europe's goodwill ambassadors, human rights activist, Bianca Jagger, put the scandal in context:

The first proposals to ban cluster bombs were made in 1974. Since that time the weapons have been used in some 25 countries and, most worryingly, they are now in the arsenals of 70 states world-wide. Cluster bombs have already killed too many innocent civilians both during and after conflict.

The Minister referred to the Oslo declaration and the countries involved in it. It is a wonderful document and I am glad to hear from the Minister that other countries are becoming more actively involved in supporting the ending of the use of these dreadful weapons. I assure the Minister my party will do all in its power to bring an end to the horrors and the evil of cluster bombs.

We support this motion, just as we support the Dublin conference scheduled for May to push for a ban on the use of these weapons. In the name of the generations of dead children we could not save, we commit ourselves to ensuring in whatever way we can that no more children die at the hands of these abominable weapons. I commend the motion to the House.