VOTERS WILL get guarantees to prevent conscription and limit defence spending before the second Lisbon referendum, according to Minister for Defence Willie O'Dea.
"There was never any possibility of conscription, but people's fears were aroused, and we have to deal with that as well as we can," Mr O'Dea said.
Describing conscription fears as "a complete joke", Mr O'Dea said the EU had recently scrapped an effort to create a 5,000-strong force. The force, known as Shirbrig, was the predecessor of the 1,500-strong "battlegroups" plan, but EU states were unable to come up with the numbers.
He did not believe that the conscription ban needed to be put into the Constitution, but the Government would get the advice of Attorney General Paul Gallagher.
"We are kicking around a few extra things, maybe, to put in. I don't want to be too specific - but just to give you a hint there was a lot of talk about conscription and defence spending.
"[Some] people read the Lisbon Treaty that we were in some way compelled to spend hugely on defence. Those sorts of things, we'll be trying to assuage fears," he told The Irish Times.
Ireland sits on the board of the European Defence Agency (EDA), set up during the Irish 2004 EU presidency, but is not bound to follow its decisions.
The body was founded to get better value for EU member states' defence budgets, but its role has increased. Exclusion from the EDA would threaten Ireland's future participation in UN peacekeeping missions, which are increasingly contracted out to regional bodies such as the EU.
"If we were to opt out of the EDA, we would not be legally precluded from getting involved in EU-organised UN-mandated missions, but it would put us in an impossible situation, I would argue, because we would not have access to the strategic information that we have had access by virtue of our membership, and we would not be involved in the organisation and planning of missions.
"In effect, it would take us out of the loop, which would mean that if there was an EU-organised operation from the time we opted out, Irish troops, from a force protection and safety position, would be in less good positions than their EU counterparts," he said.
"I would not be prepared to send troops. They wouldn't be involved in planning the mission. They wouldn't be involved in the usual pre-mission discussions with military in other countries.
Rejecting suggestions that he was exaggerating, Mr O'Dea said: "Any time we tried to counteract the scares the last time, we ourselves were accused of trying to scare people. If somebody wants to call telling the truth scaring people, well, I can't control that. I am telling you on the public record the advice which I have got from the Army - which they will stand over to a man.
The EDA would be useful to cut Irelands military equipment costs. "The Pentagon gets three times the value that the EU gets when it purchases. We can get an awful lot more for less," he said.
