David Norris (Independent)

The Commission will be quite big. That reverses all the arguments. They are now on their head, and that is fine, but if we were the only one, ours would be put in charge of the tea-making committee.

Then there is the matter of the tax regime. The international financial system is now very volatile. Certainly, I could not predict what would happen with regard to that particular protection but I would point to the views expressed by Dr. Antoin Murphy of Trinity College Dublin — I referred to them in this House some time ago — that inevitably we would have to face what he described as a kind of black hole in the Irish economy. I hope that the present regime can be sustained. I will leave it at that.

With regard to neutrality, I have been concerned for a long time about the European armaments group, which has now coyly been renamed the European defence association. I wrote, but at a fairly late stage, to the committee asking that this should be considered and giving some outline arguments about it. I am not sure that this matter was addressed in any great detail.

In that regard, people have questioned the participation of Mr. Declan Ganley. He is a person of whose illustrious reputation I was completely unaware until the Lisbon treaty referendum campaign, in which he certainly took a spectacular part. People wondered why he did so. My suspicions about the European armaments group were confirmed when Mr. Ganley got involved in the campaign. Why would someone with apparent connections to the American munitions industry seek to undermine the European Union's attempt to pass the Lisbon treaty? I believe there was a conflict of interest between the American munitions industry and the growth of a centralised munitions industry within the European Union which had the intention of manufacturing arms not only to equip our own forces but also to compete with the powerful military-industrial complex in the United States. For the first time, this group is being incorporated into the architecture of the EU. That is a step too far for me.

In the way it constantly changes its name and elements of its structure, the European armaments group reminds me of the AIDS virus. Our triple lock strategy plays the same role as the triple therapy. The disease remains but it is becoming chronic instead of fatal. It is a cancer at the heart of Europe.

I wish to refer to an excellent series of articles by Dr. Karen Devine, who is a post-doctoral fellow in Dublin City University. She outlined a history of neutrality dating back to Thucydides's account of the Peloponnesian war, which was not a very happy example from our point of view. The island of Melos declared neutrality between Athens and Sparta but the Athenians invaded and massacred the populace of the island. That is a primitive example but for the sake of honesty I have to record facts that are uncomfortable for my case. In 1408, a French king declared neutrality in the disputes between the various popes who sat in Avignon and elsewhere. This was followed in America in the neutrality Act of 1794.

While we have been interested in neutrality for a long time, ours has never been a principled neutrality. Mr. de Valera's neutrality was not at all principled. We all know that he would have sold out had he been given the Six Counties. It happened to be a wise choice but who knows whether it was deliberate given that his mind was opaque? However, the Irish people have a real commitment to neutrality and many of us were offended by the use of Shannon Airport not only for the transport of massive numbers of American troops, which the Government claimed was purely for monetary reasons, but also for the purpose of extraordinary rendition. Neutrality has been the most consistent reason given for voting against the Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice and Lisbon treaties. I could stomach the earlier treaties but this one has gone too far, especially when I note the attempt to rebuff this argument by the distinguished Institute of European Affairs and Patrick Keatinge. I am amazed these people have the gall to claim that we bought the concept of common defence when it was first included in the Maastricht treaty in 1992. We raised the issue at the time but were told that our neutrality would not be compromised. Now we are told we have already signed up to common defence. That is what I mean by incremental militarism.

The best survey, the social and political attitudes survey, found that Irish people understand the term "neutrality" to mean non-involvement in wars, independence, impartiality, non-aggression, the primacy of the UN and UN peacekeeping and not supporting big powers. This is an active concept of neutrality.