Malcolm Byrne (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire. I join in paying tribute to those who serve and have served in our Defence Forces and their families. This debate has very much been around whether Ireland should join particular organisations. That is not what this debate is about. It is about the question of the kind of world we wish to see; the values we as Irish people wish to articulate on a global level and what will inform those. We all wish to see a safer world. We all wish to see a world in which the values and principles we hold dear around human rights and, as Senator Higgins said, the international rule of law are upheld. The question is as to what our geopolitical security and defence policy should be and what our position on it should be.

We have always been a supporter of multilateral organisations. My party has a proud tradition of supporting multilateralism. We believe that narrow ethnonationalism, as advocated by other parties, is what contributes to global instability in many cases. Multilateral organisations have ensured that we have had co-operation at a global level and have been able to build trust. The EU is the greatest example of a peace-building organisation. Our contribution historically, from the League of Nations through to the United Nations and in the EU, has been very strong and we need to go further in those places.

The challenge we need to talk about now, however, is that many of the wars of the present and, indeed, the future will not be fought by boots on the ground. Increasingly what we will is hybrid warfare and engagement in cyberattacks. More and more of these cyberattacks will be state sponsored. I will refer to the Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2022, in which Microsoft measures where digital attacks are now happening. Microsoft has reported that cyberattacks have jumped this year from 20% being nation-state attacks to now being 40%. This includes Iranian actors and North Korea, which regularly tries to steal technology from aerospace and other companies. It also includes China, which is not just attacking the United States and Australia to gather information or technology but is also attacking countries in the global south including Namibia, Mauritius and Trinidad and Tobago, simply because those countries are standing up to China's economic imperialism.

Even today, the European Parliament's web servers are under a Russian-sponsored pro-Kremlin attack. We saw an attack on the HSE in the middle of a pandemic which emanated from Russia. I respect the Minister engaged with the Russian Embassy but if that was a democracy, we would be calling the ambassador in and demanding further inquiries and so on. However, we do not seem to apply the same standards in terms of what is happening with Russia.

We need to do a number of things on a global level. We need to campaign for a digital Geneva Convention, whereby critical infrastructure such as health services will not be subject to cyberattack and if we are to have such a convention, we need to have sanctions in place against the countries that will breach it. The problem we have is with regard to the neutrality we designed in the 1930s and 1940s and, actually, we were never neutral. Rather, we were non-aligned and having such a foreign policy is important. We have to look at the world we face in the 2020s and 2030s, which is increasingly divided between those who share our values, understand the principles of international law and the importance of human rights and increasingly authoritarian countries such as Russia, China and others.

I wish to talk about what China is doing. Its belt and road strategy includes what is essentially economic colonialism. It is making countries in the global south dependent to a far greater extent that what would have happened in colonial history and exploiting what is happening there. I agree with Senator Higgins about our standing up for international rule of law but how, at a global level, how do we deal with the countries that do not believe in respecting the international rule of law and engage in cyberespionage and cyberterrorism? We have to have mechanisms to address that. That is why an alliance of democracies has to be formed to defend those values at a global level.That is what our defence and security policy needs to be about at a geopolitical level. If that means that down the line we consider joining or participating in particular organisations, and I certainly think we should be taking part in some of the cyber initiatives under PESCO, as well as exploring other areas, then we have to decide that if we are going to stand up for the values we hold dear at a global level, in those circumstances, we have to join the necessary alliances in order to protect those.

That does not necessarily mean joining NATO, which, by the way, we did not join due to principle but rather due to fear of too close an association with the UK in the late 1940s and concern around partition. We have to move away from this debate being about membership of organisations and have a real consideration around geopolitics and national security concerns.