An tOrd Gnó - Order of Business
Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-17
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Gerard P. Craughwell (IND), Labour Panel

The Minister for Defence made a statement on radio in the last few days about Ireland boarding Russian shadow ships. I do not blame the Minister, as she is in the job a couple of weeks, but somebody somewhere advised her it would be possible for us to do this. It is not possible for Ireland to board shadow ships. Even if we do and we find contraband, be it oil or anything else, what do we do with it? The one ship we have is costing us €100,000 a week to keep in Cork because we cannot dispose of it; that follows the drug interdiction some time ago. I truly feel for Ministers who are advised and make public statements that are totally at odds with our capability. We have one ship at sea in the Atlantic. We do not have capacity to fast-rope onto ships. Even if we did, it has been established since mid-2024 that these shadow ships now have armed guards on board, probably people from the former Wagner Group, who have no difficulty whatsoever in killing people. We need the Minister in here for a debate on defence. I ask that we try to do that in the very near future.
I will make a final point in the couple of seconds I have left about the critical situation with respect to air traffic control. We now have a situation where Cork Airport was closed for seven hours due to the absence of an air traffic controller. People get sick or cannot turn up to work for whatever reason. Dublin Airport and the Air Corps have suffered outages because of the absence of air traffic controllers. This is a situation we have to get on top of and quickly. We need the Minister for Transport to come in to discuss air traffic control and what measures are being taken to ensure that we have a sufficient number of air traffic controllers. We should always have a surplus of air traffic controllers to ensure the safe management and running of our airports.
Those are the two Ministers I would like the Leader to try to organise to come in here. I appreciate his time on that.

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