Defence Forces
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-17
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Helen McEntee (FG), Meath East

I respectfully say that we are not moving away from anything. In fact, if the Deputy talks to anybody in the UN, they will tell her that Ireland is one of the staunchest defenders of multilateralism and of the UN, whether it is peacekeeping or humanitarian work and support. We will continue to defend that but at the moment, the structure that we subscribed to is not working. At the moment, we cannot send our troops to missions because there have been no new mandated missions since 2014. In fact, there is not even a threat of a vote because they know that they are going to be pushed back on. I mentioned the UNIFIL mission. We had the mission in Macedonia and the Yugoslav republic. Because it did not have a Security Council mandate, we were not able to participate in that particular mission back in 1999. There was Operation Sophia, which was replaced by Operation Irini, which did not have a mandate until 2016. We could not join. We had the Maritime Analysis and Operations Centre, which is an international maritime intelligence centre supported by the EU, something which we should absolutely be able to join given our geographical situation. Although we are a strong supporter of the centre, because it did not have a UN mandate, we could not join this operation. We are not able to join operations we should be a part of because of something we imposed on ourselves at a time when we were living in a very different world. I want to reassure people because of this suggestion that this will impact our neutrality. We cannot be clearer; I cannot be clearer. We are a militarily neutral country sending peacekeeping troops to places where they need us most. The Deputy is right, this is at a time when the world needs our support and where they need peacekeeping troops and that focus on humanitarian support and we cannot do it. We have no ability to do it. What I want to do is change that to allow our troops to continue what is a very proud and much needed tradition.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-02-17/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:38+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-17