Cabinet Committees
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-13
============================================================

Micheál Martin (FF), Cork South-Central

The Deputy raised defence and security. The fundamental change to the defence and security posture across Europe relates to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s utilisation of modern technologies, the appalling loss of life on both sides in the war at the front line and the trenches, and the indiscriminate bombing of energy infrastructure.
Europe feels very vulnerable to Russian attack and Russian rearmament. That is the more fundamental issue, not the US or anybody else. The fundamental issue facing European security right now is Russia. The Baltics feel it is an existential threat. The defence budgets of all of those countries have gone way up, and there are huge strains on their budgets as a result. Europe is very vulnerable to that, and it feels it.
Whether we agree with that here or not, it is the reality on the ground across the European Continent. There is a real debate within Europe about increasing military and defence capabilities. From an Irish perspective, that means that, yes, we have to increase our spending on defence and our military capability. We are focused on undersea critical infrastructure in terms of cybersecurity and developing technologies that can protect that. In other words, the economic security dimension is very important to Ireland. We have to increase our spending in that area to protect our economic security, and do it in solidarity with others. I make no apologies for saying that. If we are honest, that is the real driver of the defence and security concerns within Europe.
In response to Deputy Tóibín, I dealt with Mercosur in my earlier remarks.

---

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/2026-01-13/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:30+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-13