Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Yesterday, I spoke on neutrality and the triple lock, and I want to return briefly to that issue. The Tánaiste, Simon Harris, is about to bring forward legislation on the triple lock and there is a lot of discussion and debate among wider society about this terrible thing that is going to be brought about by the Government. There are many misconceptions that the triple lock was always there, but it was not; the triple lock is a fairly recent part of Irish history. The public need to ask themselves whether we really want somebody outside our sovereign State making decisions for our Defence Forces at any time. I am not advocating for the Government to have carte blanche to send troops wherever it wants. What I am saying is that we should not be subservient to the United Nations Security Council at any stage.

If the Government wants to build in checks and balances, it can build the checks and balances within the State itself. Let the citizens of this State decide. I am not saying we should go to a referendum every time we need to deploy troops, but we can build a system whereby, first and foremost, it would be debated in the Houses of Parliament, the Oireachtas, both the Seanad and the Dáil. Perhaps the Council of State or a body such as that could have oversight of that debate. Maybe that is the way forward. Clearly, what we want to do is to put accurate information into the public domain that, first, the triple lock is not in the Constitution, second, it is not the case that it has been there since the foundation of the State and, third, it requires a sovereign State to seek permission from other states, some of which are belligerent against this State, so we need to sort that out.

The other matter I want to bring up this morning - I also spoke about it last week - is the search and rescue contract at Shannon Airport. We now know that the Sligo contract will not start until 30 April. The Irish Independent recently published an extremely worrying article on this matter. I have been contacted by senior pilots on this. I am not a pilot; I know nothing about flying an aeroplane. I never flew a search and rescue mission in my life but what I do know is that we lost four people in this country as a result of mismanagement and the Rescue 116 report pointed out all of the flaws. Two of the flaws pointed out related to the requirement to have an aviator in the Department of Transport and an aviator in the Irish Coast Guard. Neither of those recommendations have been followed through on. We have an oversight of the safety requirements of search and rescue. I will not go back into the detail of the company that has the contract, but it is not an internationally renowned company with expertise in search and rescue as far as I and many pilots in the country are concerned. The company that is overseeing these things does not have the breadth and depth of expertise that is required in this area. We were told two accidents took place. I have been told several more accidents took place in training. We need to get a Minister with responsibility for SAR in here and to discuss this in an open forum.