Madam, - I wish to thank Dr Karen Devine for her detailed response (December 8th) to my letter of December 2nd.
However, I still wish to question her choice of sources, upon which she bases her interpretations of EU defence policy.
For example on the EU-Nato "Berlin Plus" agreements, Dr Devine mentions only a 1996 agreement between the now defunct Western European Union and Nato and seems to ignore the later EU-Nato agreements that led to the "Berlin Plus" agreements in 2003.
The EU and Nato only started formal co-operation on security issues on January 24th, 2001 and the EU-Nato "Berlin Plus" agreements were only adopted on March 17th, 2003 following the "EU-Nato Declaration on ESDP" of December 16th, 2002 (see http://www.nato.int/issues/nato-eu/index.html or Howorth's more recent book published in 2007).
On the Lisbon Treaty, Dr Devine chooses to base some of her arguments on the interpretations of some of the participants from some neutral member-states in the European Convention of 2002-2003, which drew up the draft EU constitutional treaty.
However, since it was the EU governments, not convention members, who signed both the Constitutional Treaty and the Lisbon Treaty, the interpretations of neutral governments are at least as important as those of convention members - for example, see the Finnish foreign minister's explanation of their support for EU defence policy and the Lisbon Treaty to the Oireachtas subcommittee on Ireland's future in the EU on November 19th, 2008 (available on www.oireachtas.ie).
Finally, in her letter Dr Devine seems to confuse the Lisbon Treaty articles on "permanent structured co-operation" with those on "common defence". As underlined by Patrick Keatinge, Peadar Ó Broin and Ben Tonra in their opinion piece (December 6th), the Irish Constitution already prohibits Ireland's participation in any EU common defence. Under the terms of the Lisbon Treaty, Ireland retains its veto over the development of any common EU defence and over EU operations.
I credit Dr Devine for stimulating a badly needed debate about Irish neutrality; but in that debate EU defence policy should be understood for what it is, not what some imagine it to be. - Yours, etc,
DANIEL KEOHANE,
Research Fellow,
European Union Institute for Security Studies,
Avenue du Président Wilson,
Paris.