Taoiseach Simon Harris has insisted that “Ireland’s neutrality is not at risk” from the Government’s legislation to amend the triple lock currently in place for Defence Forces deployment overseas.
He confirmed in the Dáil that the Cabinet has given approval for legislation changing the triple lock removing the requirement for UN approval, as well as Cabinet and Dáil sanction for the deployment of more than 12 troops.
In a row on the triple lock Mr Harris stressed that the change will “absolutely protect Ireland’s neutrality” after the plan was trenchantly criticised by the Opposition.
He pointed out that the Government had not approved any new mission since 2014. “It has become so difficult to even agree or renew a UN peacekeeping mandate,” he said, adding that “the increased use or threat of the use of the veto by permanent members of the UN Security Council has directly impacted on our role in international peacekeeping”.
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People Before Profit TD Bríd Smith said, however, that the triple lock was introduced to encourage people to vote for the Nice Treaty in 2001, and since then no veto has ever been used to block any peacekeeping activities.
Ms Smith said that Tánaiste Micheál Martin, who will introduce the amending legislation, argued when in opposition at the time that “the triple lock is at the core of our neutrality and he refused to accept the argument that it gives a veto to Russia of our peacekeeping activities”.
She pointed out that the programme for government “explicitly commits this Government to fully maintaining neutrality and the triple lock” but “now the triple lock is to go” despite that commitment.
Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald said it was a “fiction” to say it was difficult to agree or renew a peacekeeping mandate and that the UN veto had directly impacted Ireland’s role in peacekeeping. “You took our troops from the Golan Heights,” she said.
Labour leader Ivana Bacik expressed deep concern at the proposal, and rejected the Tánaiste’s claim that the triple lock leaves decisions on deployment of Irish troops in the hands of China and Russia. She said this “is not the case”.
“The legislation underpinning the requirement for UN approval specifies that authorisation can be provided by the Security Council or the General Assembly – where there is no veto in that way.”
People Before Profit TDs Richard Boyd Barrett and Paul Murphy also sharply criticised the move. Mr Boyd Barrett accused the Taoiseach of “taking the people of Ireland for fools when you suggest that your plan to dismantle the triple lock is not a full attack on Ireland’s neutrality”.
He claimed the Government was moving Ireland to an EU militarisation project and “aligning us with one camp in a very dangerous escalation of military competition across the world”.
Mr Murphy asked if the triple lock was gone what military missions the Taoiseach wanted to send troops on that he could not currently send them on?
However, the Taoiseach said that nobody had yet seen the legislation “and I do think that it is really important that before we start to demonise each other, or put each other in ideological camps, we actually have an opportunity to debate and consider the outcomes of the consultative forum on international security policy in June 2023″.
He said the forum highlighted the need to revisit triple lock requirements, and called for a “new process to replace the current system underpinning the deployment of Irish troops abroad, which effectively allows UN Security Council members to bind Ireland’s hands in international engagement through the exercise of a veto or indeed the threat of same”.
Insisting that no new mission had been authorised since 2014, Mr Harris stressed that “any legislation we bring forward will absolutely protect Ireland’s neutrality. Ireland’s neutrality is not at risk, as much as Deputy Smith may wish for her own political gain to suggest it is.”
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