David Norris (Independent)

I welcome the Minister of State. We have had a certain amount of sparring over the period on this matter but we have finally managed to bring our views into a certain degree of alignment. I welcome this opportunity to speak on the Bill because I was probably the first person in this House at the time of the previous referendum to declare a position against the Lisbon treaty. I made my reservations and the reason for those reservations perfectly clear. They were because of what I perceived as the increasing militarisation of the Union and my inability to get this taken seriously at Government level, particularly the "morphing", to use a horrible modern word, of the European armaments group into the less sinister-sounding European Defence Agency. I tried to raise this with the Oireachtas joint committee established but they ignored it. I tried to raise it with the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Micheál Martin, and it was deflected in a manner fairly similar to the way in which the abuse of Shannon Airport during the rendition flights period was brushed aside by answering completely different questions to the ones I raised. However, I was very pleased with the assistance of some of the departmental officials who are here today to extract in the weeks before the final vote on this referendum a specific commitment from the Minister on behalf of the Government and signed and delivered to me and with the indulgence of the Chair I wish to put some of this correspondence on the record of the House. It is the instrument that allowed me to change sides, which I wanted to do, because I have always supported the European Union and the European movement generally. He first wrote some nice things about my change of heart and then continued:

I am happy to give you the reassurance you request regarding Ireland's position on an EU munitions industry. We would have no interest in supporting any efforts to develop a European munitions industry for export. The Lisbon Treaty does not contemplate any such policy initiative or make any provision for movement in that direction. Ireland would indeed resist any pressure which might be exercised in future by any Member State to take the Union down such a route, which would , of course, require a unanimous decision in the unlikely event that any such move were ever to be contemplated at EU level.

In my opinion this amounts to a commitment to use the veto. The reason for my concern is the kind of incautious things said over the preceding years and also during the first referendum campaign by, in particular, the French, who seemed to be driving in this direction. It appeared to me they were determined to use the kind of shelf company of the European armaments group to promote this idea of a munitions industry for export and to go into competition with the American munitions industry. In my view this explained the intervention of Mr. Declan Ganley because he was plugged in to certain aspects of the American munitions establishment. I thought that was one of his principal motivations in campaigning against the Lisbon treaty because he saw the danger of competition in this area. This aspect was never explored by people in public, so far as I know.

He was a bit of an embarrassment on the occasion when I was on the "No" side but there were a lot of other embarrassments. I refer to those people who said that if we voted for Lisbon, we would get homosexual marriage and abortion information and God knows what else. As I said at the time, if I thought that, I would vote for it. Although I am not sure that sexual orientation is actually included in the provisions of this Bill-----