Gerard P. Craughwell Questions Ireland's Neutrality and Triple Lock

I want to put my questions in context, if you don't mind. I don't believe that Ireland is a neutral country within the internationally accepted meaning of the word. Neither is it a non-aligned country, as it has never joined the associated itself with the non-aligned movement, which consists of 120 member countries. My personal wish is for Ireland to be, for the first time since independence, to become a truthful, honourable and military-resourced neutral state, similar to the only two remaining true European neutral states, Austria and Switzerland, and the former neutrals of Finland and Sweden, who left neutrality in 23 and 24, respectively. The Hague Convention 5, respecting the rights and duties of neutral powers, was signed on the 18th of October 1907. The Convention codifies the obligations of countries declaring themselves to be neutral. Ireland was not a contracting power, it predated independence, but neither has it post-independence ratified the Convention, or imported it into domestic laws, as confirmed in the High Court case by Justice Kearns in the case of Horgan in 2003. Hague, 1907, forms part of that body of law called customary international law. In essence, states practice over time. I'm sure you'll agree with that one, Professor Murphy. Article 22 of the said Convention states, and I quote, No signatory power may adhere to the present Convention. Further, Article 22 states, the powers which desire to adhere notifies its intention in writing to the Netherlands' government, forwarding it to the Act of Adhesion, which shall be deposited in the archives of the said government. At the beginning of the Second World War in 1939, there was a government in the Netherlands. Ireland could have submitted its neutrality intent. It did not. And to my knowledge, it has not, at any stage, ever declared its neutrality. So I ask the following questions. Firstly, is Ireland a neutral country in the context of customary international law? And if you believe that it is, what are the tangible elements leading to any assertion of Ireland's being a neutral country, other than the government stating that it was without such an assertion being contested with empirical evidence? Secondly, if you believe Ireland is a neutral state, why is it that currently Austria and Switzerland, and up until recently Finland and Sweden, pursued their neutrality in a polar opposite way to the way Ireland has its alleged neutrality? And thirdly, Article 2 of the Hague Convention 1907 states, and I quote, belligerents are forbidden to move troops or convoys of either ammunition or war supplies across the territory of a neutral power. Ireland's borders are land, at sea and in the air. In light of the recent and ongoing opposition political and media outcry of US military and US contracted aircraft passing through Irish airspace carrying munitions of war, how could Ireland, if it were to be actually a proper neutral state, comply with the requirements of international law on such issues with the historical and current dysfunctional state of the Defence Forces? Next, does any country, neutral or neutral country, have a triple lock? And where does this leave sovereignty? Your thoughts I would be interested on in increasing the ceiling from 12 to 50 troops before the triple lock applies. Your thoughts on adding new permitted activities abroad by our troops or our Defence Forces, and here I'm specifically speaking about counter-narcotics, evacuation operations, and protection of our embassies and diplomats overseas. I do believe there's a lot of common ground in what has been submitted by you, and I am not arguing the government's case in the case of triple lock. However, I don't see a relationship between triple lock and neutrality of any sort. So I'd be interested to know, because you did advert constantly to UN Security Council, so I'm wondering where it leaves us with Article 52 of the UN Charter, because, as you're aware, with Article 52, you can have regional organisations set up their own. And finally, the last question is, Ireland has decided, as you've pointed out in your submissions, to opt out of any European military arrangement. Should the European Union decide to opt out of any protection of Ireland? It's only fair. One side does exactly what the other side does. I'm sorry, there's a lot of questions there, but I've got seven minutes. I need you to get them in. Thank you. It leaves two minutes, so I don't know. Can the speakers do a miracle of laws and fishes with those questions now, to be honest? But is there any particular speaker you wish to address those? Do you wish all three speakers to...? I'm quite happy for any one of the members to reply to either or all questions. OK, grand. So, look, we might start left to right. So, Professor Murphy, and if you can take, kind of, roughly, I don't know, 50 seconds to a minute to reply. So, thanks for the series of questions, Senator. It might surprise you that I agree with you that we're not, in terms of international law, we do not fulfil the obligations of a formerly neutral state. But, at the same time, I would argue that it has been government policy that we are militarily neutral or militarily non-aligned. And it is the prerogative of every sovereign state to decide on its own policies. They don't have to meet some kind of international definition. And I consider that we have compromised our military neutrality by arrangements, very close arrangements, with NATO, Partnership for Peace, etc. But I think that the removal of the triple lock is very significant because it's essentially going to remove something that's been in place for decades. From the very beginning, and this was discussed in great detail in the Dáil back in the 1950s and 1960s, we're removing the requirement for the UN to approve and give legitimacy to Ireland's participation in an international force abroad. By doing so, we're joining all those states that we're actually critical of, that are rendering the United Nations dysfunctional. Because we're agreeing to do something which bypasses the UN, instead of working to make the UN more effective and try to bring the parties, the major powers and others, to use the UN as the form that it was intended for. So, I mean, a lot of the other questions that you put follow on from whether Ireland is neutral or not. And if you look at the voting record of Ireland over many years at the United Nations, especially in the early years, it was very much in favour of the so-called West. So, I don't believe we are neutral in that sense. And our joining the European Union clearly established a pro-European, pro-what I understood the European Union, for example, to have been in the early days, OK, it's based on economic prosperity and co-operation, but something which was motivated by after the Second World War as a peace project. And I'm afraid that the European Union is betraying its early values. I would especially cite, I'm slightly wondering now, but yours was a very broad question, so I'm trying to answer some of the issues. If you look at articles, if you look at the preamble in Articles 2 and 3 of the Treaty of the European Union, most recently updated by the Lisbon Treaty, it talks about certain values. It talks about human rights. It talks about rule of law. It talks about peaceful resolution of disputes. A whole range of things. And if we permit our forces to be part of a European Union stand-alone force, I don't have confidence in our European partners to actually adhere to the values that are set out in that treaty. And I'd cite you just two simple examples. I don't want to get distracted on Gaza. But let me say, we might just allow a small bit of time for the other two speakers to make a contribution as well. Thank you. Last week, the German Foreign Minister met the Israeli Foreign Minister. And he reassured him that support of Germany is steadfast. We will continue to give you armaments as you need them. And the provision of armaments to the Israeli government was never in doubt. To me, that totally flouts the values that the European Union has set out for itself in its own treaties. And you can understand how I'm somewhat cynical then about some of the international projects of the European Union. Thanks. Morning, sign for just a brief contribution maybe from Dr. Devine and Professor McGuire. So maybe if you can... Thank you, Senator Crowell, for your questions. So, firstly, the European Commission actually told neutral states who were applicants that they had to get rid of neutrality. And that's where the term military neutrality was born. So that's cited in my paper, edicts from 1967, several from 1992. I've also cited in my paper the explanation of how military neutrality bears absolutely no relation to active positive neutrality, as reflected in the Hague Conventions, and how public opinion supports active positive neutrality. But the government is doing the exact opposite to that, and you are right in your observations in that respect. The third point is that a state doesn't actually have to ratify the Hague Conventions for them to apply if you declare your neutrality. The use of Shannon is a violation of the Hague Conventions, and a majority of people in surveys are against this, because it does violate neutrality. Sweden has a triple lock, always did. And along those lines, most independent middle powers, like Ireland is at the UN, have that. Obviously, I presume it's gotten rid of it now by the time it's joined NATO. And you say, you know, what about the protection of Ireland? The question is, against what threat? So this idea of new permitted activities abroad, I say that they have to be UN-authorised. Last sentence that, although my colleague Ray Murphy was saying that the EU is a peace project, I'm actually writing a paper about how the EU is actually not a peace project, and it's orange, it was imperialist and colonialist. And Jean Monnet himself said in his memoirs that the creation of an EU army will help Europe realise its ultimate destiny, which is the development of the African continent. And then Federica Mogherini cited Jean Monnet and said, very last sentence, and said when she launched PESCO and the European Permanent Structure Cooperation and Defence, that we want to go beyond Sub-Saharan Africa and we want to go east and towards Russia. I'm going to have to give it to you very brief now. I'll try to be indeed. It's a pleasure to be in contact with Senator Crockwell again. I met him at the first day of the Cork Forum and gave him a copy of this. I really welcome and would love to be in dialogue in any way on these ideas. I have said in my submission, neutrality is very much demeaned, etc., but neutrality is a politically contested concept in any society. And this committee has recently had some concerns about the meaning of defence and security. These are also concepts whose meaning and application is up for grabs, and that's what we need to get back into. We were the first neutral, and now we're being preached to about what other countries have done, because we sat on our hands and closed our mouths when we joined the EU, as we too often have done on the Security Council as well. The operations abroad, in my submission I took, they are scarifying, and the Commission casually mentions space. You know, are we actually going to have a space force? This is, you know, Lewis Mumford, the social critic, final sentence. In 1946, he wrote an article in the Saturday Evening Post, and he said, gentlemen, you are mad. I don't mean you, by the way, are mad. He was writing to the leaders, and then he said, we are mad for not confronting it. Very final point. I'd just like to come back. Armed neutrality, I'm concerned about. Okay, it must not be escalatory or feed into the military-industrial complex, but I have no difficulty with a country genuinely defending itself. Thank you. I'm going to come on. Thank you very much, Chair. Again, I want to put my position on the table here. This is a red herring waste of time within this Oireachtas at the moment, the triple lock. I know of nobody who is interested in it outside of this house. I know of nobody interested in it. If you were to put it on a survey, it would probably come in somewhere around 50 or 55 of the areas of priority for the public. Perhaps we should introduce a triple lock for ministers going abroad on St. Patrick's Day and restrict that to numbers. It is a ridiculous piece to come before this house, but we're stuck with it. We have to deal with it. My only reason for removing the triple lock is that there are areas which are currently limited by the triple lock, and that would be the area of counter-narcotic operations, evacuation operations. Let's say a Ryanair aircraft is hijacked. It's in a country where they don't have special forces. A request is sent to Ireland to send out special forces to relieve the aircraft. We may find ourselves unable to do that because of the triple lock. Operations of protection of embassies and the like as well. So it's my view that we are a sovereign state. There are two houses of the Oireachtas. There is a government. It should be possible to write legislation that would force the government to have a significant majority. I do appreciate what you said, Professor Maguire, about, you know, the whipped government. They will always win a vote, and we saw that in the last 24 hours. They can win any vote they want at the end of the day. But my view here is that for our troops to go abroad, and please, Professor Murphy, you've served overseas. I've served in the military. I know of nobody that says Ireland is great because they're neutral. We serve with the Poles. We serve with the Finns. We serve with all sorts of people overseas. So my key question here is, keeping the triple lock, how do we mount counter-narcotic operations, evacuation operations, and protection of embassies abroad? And one final point, and I've written a paper on this. It's available on my LinkedIn site, and that is the protection of the Atlantic resources. It is the Atlantic resources, our European resources, and with one ship, we can hardly protect them, and we certainly can't protect them up there. So if you'd start, maybe, Professor Murphy. Sorry about that. Thanks for the easy question, Senator. But I take it then, Senator, that you don't actually, you don't oppose the retention of the triple lock for participation in UN peacekeeping operations, or am I misunderstanding you? No, no, no. As I say, we should be talking about the real issues in defence, not the triple lock. So I don't interest in whether it's removed or whether it stays. Okay, okay. So I must then apologise. I assume that you actually were in favour of the legislation proposing its abolition. Well, in my view, the triple lock doesn't actually prevent Ireland from sending forces abroad to evacuate personnel. I think that that's permissible under current legislative, the legislative framework. It has nothing to do with seeking UN mandate or UN approval. It's completely separate and nothing to do. So I see nothing wrong, and although they're set out here, you know, to undertaking military close protection or military security and humanitarian tasks, as I understood the legislation and my interpretation was that actually that's already permissible. It's just expressly incorporating it here, which for clarity is welcome. Okay. And so undertaking, you know, the illicit drug trafficking by sea and air, international operations, that is potentially problematic, all right. And we have, for example, run into difficulties with the humanitarian mission in the Mediterranean, you know, when we were rescuing, when the Irish Navy was participating in rescuing refugees and those fleeing from countries where there are hostilities, et cetera, taking place. So, but that again, they found a way of circumventing that by entering into bilateral arrangements. So it's not actually threatened. There are ways and means of doing so. And, I mean, you said to me, you know, that nobody really cares about the triple lock. Well, I just had a casual conversation with some people in a tent outside of Leinster House as I entered here this morning, and they care very deeply about it. And they represent a lot of people, you know, and I'm not, I'm here as an individual. I'm not representing any group, and I'm not part of any group. And for the purposes of clarity, I might as well say that for every European treaty that has come before us, I have voted in favour. And not only that, but I've actually gone on occasions with a political party advocating for a yes vote. So I've never really been a strong Eurosceptic, but I've come to have to review some of those positions in more recent years. So, I mean, back to the basics. Irish forces have a long history, which I hope will continue, of participating in UN peacekeeping operations. To make that legitimate, to really make that important in terms of the maintenance of international peace and security, to follow with the long tradition of our foreign policy on disarmament and peaceful resolution of disputes, we should not embark on something which circumvents and avoids the United Nations. The United Nations is our best option for international peace, security, and for humanity in general. And so, therefore, I think it's the forum where we should engage and seek to be as constructive as possible. And this particular period of, you know, during the 1960s, there were grave disputes taking place, as serious as now within the Security Council, in particular over the UN peacekeeping operation in the Congo. But we overcame those difficulties. You know, life is cyclical. This period of terrible tension and disruption and conflict will ultimately come to an end. I hope that when that does happen, that the consequences won't have been terrible for humanity in general. But it's really up to states, middle power states like Ireland, to find common ground and fight for the values of the United Nations. Can I just interrupt you for a moment, Professor? We are a sovereign nation. Yeah. We stand proudly amongst the nations of the world. There is no other nation has a triple lock. Surely to God, we can rely and trust the Parliament of the state to decide. I fully accept UN mandate, absolutely. But we do not need the UN to tell us where we can move our troops. And if you're interpreting that now as me being pro-removal of triple lock, I am agnostic on it. I see it as a red herring. But I am really concerned that the Parliament of the state is being overseen by other entities outside the state when it comes to our troops. And I think we should be able to draft legislation that would set the bar significantly high enough to protect the state. That's a reasonable position to adopt, Senator. I don't agree. It's not that I don't trust the Parliamentarians, but the very fact that we're having this discussion about the triple lock, which, not that long ago, the government gave us an undertaking that they would retain it. And if they were to dispense with it, it would be by means of a referendum. I rest my case. As do I. As I said, I'm neither a lawyer nor a parliamentarian. I cannot see that the UN is wrong in telling us that the UN Charter is an instrument of international law. If that instrument wants to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war and says there shall be no threat of force issued by any state without the authorisation of the Security Council, I am quite prepared to see any sense of Irish sovereignty not being subservient to that, but being pooled in the one body that can save succeeding generations. So I'm proud of our identity, I'm proud of our independence, but I think they are in no way, as de Valera said, talking about it, in no way endangered by joining the UN. And if we're in the UN, which we are, I may be wrong. A lawyer may tell me the UN is not an instrument of international law, but the UN says it is. If the UN wasn't having that view, we wouldn't have the conflict in Gaza today, we wouldn't have the conflict in Ukraine. The UN is a dysfunctional organisation which is dominated by superpowers, and that's a sad reflection on the organisation. And there's Shkalele, Senator, which I've tried to argue in defending peace. There has been a process of undermining and scapegoating the UN. The UN has been sadly depleted. And don't take my answer, Erskine Childress III, he really tells us how the UN can be rescued and transformed. There has been a process of damaging. Professor, the United States are currently engaging with the Israelis with a view to reviewing the UNIFIL operation. If the United States, who paid 26% of all peacekeeping operations, if they decide they're removing the mandate for UNIFIL, the Irish troops will be home the following day. And that is the end of the UNIFIL operation, and they can then do whatever the hell they want in Gaza or anywhere else. Our troops will finish up having nowhere to go. And I go back to Article 52, and you've adverted to it yourself, Professor Murphy. Article 52 allows people to engage in peacekeeping on a regional basis, at a regional request, providing the principles and policies of the UN are observed. So, again, I make nock stick on the triple lock. I'm going to move on there now, because I still have one or two indicators.