Last year the Government issued 416 military export licences and 739 licenses for the export of goods which may be used for military purposes, a report by Amnesty International has revealed.
Much of this equipment was exported to countries with poor human rights records, including China, Turkey, Albania, and Saudi Arabia according to the report launched today entitled
Ireland and the Arms Trade - Decoding the Deal
.
Amnesty is calling on the Oireachtas to establish a formal committee to scrutinise the data provided by the Government on the transfer of military, security and police (MSP) goods.
The report found that information on Ireland’s arms trade, as provided by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment (DETE) is "insufficient, confusing and aggregated to such a point as to thwart the most determined attempts to identify specific exports."
The report suggests that it could be argued "that if a country had deliberately set up a system of licence control which was specifically designed to frustrate parliamentary scrutiny and confuse any attempt to discover the level and extent of the current MSP business, it would probably design something like the present Irish system."
"This report shatters . . . Irish complacency about our involvement in the arms trade," said Mr Sean Love, Director of the Irish section of Amnesty International. "If we export a software package that controls the bombing equipment on military jets then we do indeed have an arms industry."