Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I want to make a final point. First, we are involved in Operation Sophia and we have Defence Force personnel - I believe there are three of them; certainly, there are two naval officers - in the headquarters of the operation. The reason we do not have a ship in the Mediterranean is that we do not have the crewing resources and so on to do so right now. Unfortunately, some of our ships are tied up because of the challenges posed by staffing numbers in the Naval Service. That is something we are working on fixing. We did not pull out of Operation Sophia because we did not like the direction it was taking. Ireland has always maintained - I was the person involved in ensuring this is the case - that EU operations in the Mediterranean need to have a humanitarian aspect as well as an enforcement aspect. That is what we bring to the debates. In the case of the practical operations in the Mediterranean, Ireland brought a fantastic capacity around humanitarian interventions, which is something I would like to do more of in the context of both our Naval Service and Air Corps being involved in UN-mandated missions, in particular, in different parts of the world, but also, from time to time, taking part in EU-mandated missions, if that is the right thing to do.

We are quite constrained by law in how and under what circumstances we send Irish Defence Forces personnel to other parts of world and with whom we can co-operate in that regard. We will talk a bit more about the Defence (Amendment) Act 2006 presently. In that legislation, an "international organisation" is defined as comprising:

(a) the United Nations,

(b) the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe,

(c) the European Union or any institution or body of the European Union, or

(d) any regional arrangement or agency that participates, or has participated, in operations as part of an International United Nations Force;

That definition is quite constrained. Senator Higgins wants to tighten it further, which we will discuss shortly. We already have quite a lot of safeguards in place, more than in virtually any other country in the European Union. In addition, of course, we have the triple lock system, which I am very supportive of because it gives reassurance for the political system. Ministers in this country are part of the Legislature as well as the Executive; that is not the case in many other countries. If I were not part of the Legislature, I would understand that there might be a need for a strong debate on checks and balances between the Legislature and Executive. In Ireland, however, Ministers are part of both and are accountable in that context.

I do not accept that it is appropriate to layer in an eight-month limit on top of all the checks and balances that are in place. In practice, most missions have rotation periods that do not exceed six months. That goes for both UN missions and non-UN missions. There is a requirement every six months to update them. I emphasise the point that a delegation order is not that big a deal in the context that it is what we have been doing for many years. It has been agreed by the Defence Forces in terms of its appropriateness and also agreed by the Department of Defence. This is not a major policy consideration; it is an operational issue in terms of command structures when multiple countries are involved in a peacekeeping mission together. I do not want to read more into this issue than perhaps is really there.