Air Navigation and Transport (Amendment) Bill 2026: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-10 ============================================================ Joe Conway (IND), Cultural and Educational Panel In the boarding school that I went to as a teenager, the favourite book for last study was an atlas. It was so favoured because underneath it you could hide your war comic. The people who read war comics as teenagers ended up in later life being aircraft geeks. As an aircraft geek living in Tramore, I can now recognise the distinctive drone of a C-130 as it goes across in the early hours of the morning, usually under cover of darkness. I immediately go to my phone and look at the Flightradar24 app, and I find that the C-130 has come from either Bangor in Maine or Halifax in Nova Scotia and is heading for Brise Norton in Oxfordshire, I think, or Germany, or going on to RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus. The stealth of those planes and their frequency since 7 October leads me to surmise that they are carrying probably the most offensive weapons in existence. Like everybody here, I am not happy about the fact that they are going through our airspace. We hear a lot of mention about how it compromises our neutrality and the rest. For the past 15 or so years, I have been thinking about this long and hard and I came to the conclusion a few years back, mainly since the second invasion of Ukraine, that our concept of neutrality was long redundant. It does not suit the state of affairs in the world because our life in what is generically called the West is under threat from bad actors in the world that we all know too much of. We have to wise up to the fact that our society and values are being eaten away by bad actors in the world. We have to wise up to our responsibilities as members of the European Union. We have to begin to look towards a contribution to defence and towards the idea of not piggybacking on other people's defence statements. The Government has great challenges from the pragmatic point of view because we are dealing with a time when we have a very tenuous and unpredictable regime in the United States. Whether we like it or not, we are inextricably and economically bound up with the United States and its economy, its goodwill and all of the things that go along with that. This idea that we should be adhering to neutrality was fine 80 or 90 years ago when Mr. de Valera was taking on Mr. Churchill on the airwaves and all that entailed. I have said this here time and again: it does not go down awfully well but the idea of adhering to a policy of neutrality is strategically myopic and is not fit for purpose in this day and age. Whether we like it or not, these flights are going to continue, be they going outside Irish airspace or not. Tramore is on the extreme south coast. It will not take a great reconfiguration of the navigation lanes for those planes to go outside and down off the south coast. It would only be a matter of ten minutes of a divergence. I can understand how well-intentioned this Bill is and I can understand the awful slaying that is going on in the Middle East at the moment. None of us can countenance that. However, there comes a time when we have to look at the bigger question, which is that we have to maintain in this country and in Europe the values that are dear to us. There will come a time when we have to make difficult choices. We will have to align with people that it would have been foreign for us to do so in times past. I would love to be in a position to support Senator Stephenson's Bill and all that it stands for because it is so humanely intentioned. It is so cogent in its appeal for the defence of the defenceless in the Middle East. However, I am speaking as an Irishman who does not believe in neutrality and who does believe in standing up for ourselves. As I often remind the House, I am in my eight decade. I have seen a lot going on and I know that the time is fast coming when we are going to have to stand up for ourselves. That means joining an alliance and playing our cognisant part in that alliance. It is going to cost, and it is going to call for us to make a seismic shift in our strategic thinking over the coming ten years. --- 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/seanad/2026-06-10/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:02+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-06-10