Tom Clonan (Independent)

I want to address the issue of neutrality and the triple lock. In the presidential election campaign, we have had a debate and interviews with the candidates, particularly the Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil candidates, on the campaign trail. The issues of the triple lock and neutrality have come up repeatedly. Much of what has been articulated consists of misinformation. I am not going to say disinformation, because that is active deception, but it is factually incorrect information about the status of the triple lock. If we remove the triple lock, it gives any future Irish Government the power to send any number of troops to any conflict in the world by means of a simple Government majority. The proposed legislation will not modify the triple lock; it will simply abolish it. We will not have even a double or single lock; things will just be done by means of a Cabinet decision and a simple Government majority.

In recent days, I have heard the presidential candidates talk about Ireland perhaps participating in a mission outside the scope of the triple lock that would not have a UN Security Council mandate. People, including former Members of this House, have declared an interest in Irish participation in, for example, a stabilisation force in Ukraine. A stabilisation force, or an SFOR, is a war-fighting mission. The last one we had was in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I was there in December of 1996 during Operation Lodestar, which was a NATO-led SFOR mission that led to full-spectrum combat operations, including air strikes on television and radio stations in Belgrade and involving collateral damage and civilian casualties. That is what we are talking about.

The continual and repeated use of the word "peacekeeping" is completely inaccurate. We need to be really careful about what we decide in these Houses in the coming months in relation to the triple lock. It behoves our presidential candidates to at least address the concerns of the Irish people directly in relation to what peace enforcement truly means. We have had Irish troops participate in peace enforcement in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2016. That was a full-spectrum combat mission, which involved the killing of hundreds and thousands of Afghan civilians and the displacement of others by the belligerent parties on both sides. That is what peace enforcement means. The era of peacekeeping, I am sorry to say, as we have seen from the unilateral decision of the Security Council to rescind the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, mandate, is over. We are in a new reality where henceforth it will be peace enforcement. We need to think really carefully about how we wish to participate in that. I am arguing that if the Government is going to use its majority to dispense with the triple lock, we need to have some other safeguards - maybe a secret ballot in the Dáil that is not whipped - but we have to do something. To assert that the triple lock has nothing to do with Irish neutrality is utterly false. It is a disgraceful thing to say. It is like suggesting that the steering and brakes in a car are not related to each other. They are intimately linked, and we need to have a constitutional guarantee and expression of military neutrality in the same way that Switzerland and Austria do. I ask for a debate on that matter.