Tom Clonan (Independent)

I raise the issue of Ireland's triple lock. Over the weekend, the Taoiseach said that he has no difficulty whatsoever bringing to the democratic Parliament of this Republic the proposal to remove the aggressor's veto. By that, the Taoiseach is referring to the veto of UN Security Council mandates and resolutions. I understand where he is coming from intellectually on that, but I ask that we all stop and think about what is being proposed. The United Nations was set up as a means of protecting ourselves from complete and total self-annihilation and while it is not perfect, to paraphrase Churchill, it is the worst form of peace assurance except for all the other kinds of peace assurance that have been tried from time to time over history. Despite its imperfections, the UN has been a guarantor, for the most part, in ensuring we do not engage in mutual self-destruction, which is a likely prospect if we continue on the trajectory we are on.

I have great respect for the Taoiseach and I understand where he is coming from intellectually, but we are sending a major signal here. We are repudiating the validity of the United Nations as a legitimate multilateral agency and saying we no longer believe in multilateralism, that we will withdraw from that system and engage in whatever the Government of the day thinks appropriate. It is a bit like the referendums. The problem is not so much what is being taken out or removed, but what it will be replaced with. The triple lock is not being replaced with anything insofar as I can discern. The removal of the triple lock means that any future Irish Government - not only this one - can send any number of Irish troops anywhere in the world to any conflict. Do I trust the Government? Of course I do. However, do governments make mistakes? Yes, they do. That unilateral capacity of a government with a small simple majority to commit our troops - our sons, daughters and grandchildren - to conflict would be a seismic change.We have to be really careful that we do not just do this in a minor defence Bill. Think of the UN since its inception; it had Stalin as a Charter member, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Shevardnadze, Yeltsin and now this aggressor, Putin. They come and go. The system is sacrosanct. We gave a solemn declaration in 2002, backed up by the Seville declaration in 2002, ratified by our EU partners, that we would not remove the triple lock. I say particularly to my colleagues in Fianna Fáil that their voters do not want to see this. We can remedy the defects of the triple lock restrictions by raising the number of troops we can send from 12 to 120. That would remedy the problem. By removing the triple lock, the Government is seriously undermining our neutral status. If it is going to do that, we need a constitutional referendum to have neutrality explicitly placed in our Constitution, as is explicitly the case in Switzerland and Austria. I say this with the utmost respect but we need a proper debate with the Taoiseach and Tánaiste on this. It is a seismic change.