Defence Forces
Dail Éireann — 2026-07-16
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Helen McEntee (FG), Meath East

There are a number of things here. What I would like to see - unfortunately, it is not happening at the moment - is that we would have further UN Security Council missions. We have not had any new ones since 2014. That is because the Security Council is not operating as it should. We have other missions that our troops are currently on. A number of personnel are serving in Entebbe in Uganda and in the Middle East. At the moment, my concern for those troops is that those missions could come to an end in the same way that Operation IRINI and the UNIFIL mission in Lebanon have because of the lack of support from individual members of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. It is my ambition that we could see future UN peacekeeping missions. Beyond that, where that is not possible, we are working with the CSDP missions through the EU. This means much smaller missions. If we look at the overall number of peacekeeping missions we are involved in and the number of troops abroad of just under 400, about 70 of them are not in UNIFIL. All of the various missions are quite small. What we bring to the table, however, is a high level of training. There is a big focus on some of the missions on cyber security, maritime security and bomb disposal, where we have a high level of training from our history. There are different options. As we develop our capabilities, we will be able to do more.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-07-16/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:52:17+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-07-16