Tom Clonan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the ambassador and the military attaché to the Seanad. I want to raise the challenges confronting Irish citizens in Sudan, who are there amid the fighting, as well as our response and what we can do in Ireland to assist them. I understand that we have successfully evacuated just short of 100 of our citizens, but there are other citizens stranded there. I listened yesterday to the account of a young woman and Irish citizen who described her mother's escape to the Egyptian border by bus from a remote part of Sudan. She described her mother crossing the desert through very dangerous terrain and being stopped by the Rapid Support Forces, RSF, at gunpoint and questioned. People in Sudan are being exposed to very traumatic experiences, whether they are outside Khartoum trying to get to other borders or within the city itself. As our diaspora grows and as we welcome new citizens from around the world, this is going to be a recurring feature for Irish citizens abroad in man-made or natural disasters. It is only a short period of time since we had to evacuate Irish citizens from Kabul in Afghanistan in August 2021. It really brings into sharp focus our capacity to assist our citizens.

At the moment there are 12 members of our special forces, the Army Ranger Wing, in Djibouti and elsewhere assisting Irish citizens who are in extremis. I think that figure is an arbitrary and idiosyncratic one that has been chosen so that we are consistent with our triple lock obligations for foreign deployments as a neutral state. When it comes to humanitarian deployments, we need to revisit the triple lock. We do not need a UN Security Council resolution to deploy our troops to assist Irish citizens or, indeed, citizens of any country or neighbouring countries. I ask the Government to revisit that figure. Confining it to 12 actually exposes our troops to risk. I also advocate for us joining the European Air Transport Command, which is based in Eindhoven in the Netherlands and is a EU initiative. Joining it would not impact on our neutrality, but it would allow us to get the heavy-lift capacity to bring our four-wheel drive vehicles out to help citizens to get across hazardous terrain, instead of them having to rely on buses and so on. I say all of this in the context of our military neutrality. I am a confirmed advocate of our military neutrality. We do not need to join a military alliance, but by being creative and inventive, Ireland, as a neutral state, can become a diplomatic superpower by assisting our citizens and other citizens in humanitarian crises like this. We just need to allow our Defence Forces to be involved.