Mr. Colm Markey:

I thank the Senator very much for the question, which I believe is critical at this juncture. As I mentioned earlier, with the change in the Afghanistan situation, the tone has been set from America and the like. Europe has always been a considered voice on the world stage; a moderate. It has always had a positive influence, probably borne out of its history. Let us consider that the great wars were all in Europe and we hopefully learned much from them.

I have a worry at this stage that this is changing somewhat and there is a need for us to go back to making sure, particularly from an Irish perspective, that our peacekeeping mentality is where we need to start from. There is a need to set a world agenda, driven by Europe, that is not about a superpower or about militarisation. It is about how we play the part of being that moderate but being proactive in terms of a response in somewhere like Afghanistan, where there are clear human rights issues and needs, and how we do that without just being another boots on the ground - I will not call it violent - military response. We must in some way move away from the superpower model to a global model. Europe is the very influence that can drive that agenda because we have never, as a bloc, gone down the strong military route. One thing that concerned me in Ursula von der Leyen's speech last week was the talk at that level about taking VAT off military investment.There are voices in Europe who would like to be big players on the world stage and they see that as a superpower with military muscle. That is a retrograde step for the world at large. We, as Irish people, have a fundamental understanding of this and we must voice that strongly in this debate so that that does not happen.