FG warns Irish neutrality must evolve to face new global threats

IRELAND’S NEUTRALITY “must evolve” to face new threats to world peace and international law, Fine Gael foreign affairs spokesman Seán Barrett has warned the Dáil.

He said that it “would be a tragic mistake for Ireland not to seek to influence the European security system in the future. We should not only be part of the European security and defence architecture but we should be one of the architects helping to design these systems to meet our needs and our view of Europe’s needs.”

The Dún Laoghaire TD said that “in today’s world, many of the threats faced by societies and states are not from each other but from armed groups and fundamentalist militants seeking to destroy the properties and lives of citizens.” Ireland should not “stand still by applying a 20th-century form of neutrality to a 21st-century world”. He added: “We must be to the forefront in the design of a common EU security and defence system in order to face new threats to world peace and international law. Our neutrality needs to evolve to take into account these changes.” He was speaking during the debate on the Biological Weapons Bill which bans the production, transportation or use of biological weapons.

Introducing the Bill, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Dick Roche said the “greatest threat arising from biological agents today may come not from states but from terrorists or other non-state actors. Biological agents are relatively cheap to develop and produce, although they are much more difficult to create as weapons and deploy. Facilities for researching and producing biological agents are easier to hide than the facilities for producing other weapons of mass destruction.

“There had been very few instances of biological weapons use by non-state actors, but the most notorious and recent was the anthrax attacks in the Washington DC area in 2001”, he said.

Labour foreign affairs spokesman Michael D Higgins warned that the Bill “falls short of including new rights of surveillance and establishing of fact.

“We were brought all round the bushes about Shannon Airport being used at the time of the Iraq war. The onus was placed on the civilian to establish there was something offensive on board.”