National Security
Dail Éireann — 2025-12-16
============================================================

Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (SF), Cork South-Central

There are many comments I would like to make but the first relates to the timeline. It sounds extremely tight. It will be purchased within the first half of the year but that is not a lot of time for the personnel to get used to this and ensure protocols are in place and so on. What struck me most was clearly the visit of President Zelenskyy was very welcome and worthwhile but the Minister has talked about it proving the radar system worked. These drones were 400 m or 500 m away from the naval vessels. They could be seen with the naked eye, so it does not prove anything on that or tell us anything about our radar capacity. I note the report last weekend by Conor Gallagher in The Irish Times made the point the LÉ William Butler Yeats did not have radar-guided weapons in the way the previous flagship, LÉ Eithne , had and it was therefore constrained in its ability.
Finally, Deputy Smith is absolutely right. There is no reason it should not be released. I believe it, certainly, but transparency is important here and we need to get serious about that.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-12-16/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:28+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-12-16