Mr. Shatter continues his efforts to make foreign policy from his Defence ministry. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Green Paper on Defence:
http://www.defence.ie/WebSite.nsf/greenpaper/3869E46778919CF780257B040041B1E9?OpenDocument
Amid tortured reasoning as to why the DF are being steadily NATO-ised (with an amusing aside comparing them to the ISO!), reference to the Emergency as the ‘Second World War’, lots of talk about terrorism (of the Islamic kind) and rather alarming musings about developing an arms industry here (that goes so well in human rights terms for other countries), we have the following expression of one of the Minister’s very favourite hobbyhorses:
The requirement for a UN resolution as part of the “triple lock” reflects the central importance of the UN in granting legitimacy to peace support and crisis management missions. At the same time, it also constitutes a self imposed, legal constraint on the State’s sovereignty in making decisions about the use of its armed forces. This could prevent the State from participating in a peace support operation. In 2003, the EU led peace support mission EUFOR Concordia in Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, was welcomed in UN resolution 1371 in terms that did not conform to the requirements of the Defence Acts at that time. Accordingly, Ireland could not participate in the mission.
The benefits of a formal legislative requirement for UN authorisation must be weighed against the possibility that this constraint may lead to an inability to act on occasions where there is a pressing moral or security imperative and overwhelming international support to do so, but where UN sanction is not forthcoming, in circumstances where a veto is exercised by a permanent member of the Security Council acting in its own national interests.
We also get a curious amalgamation of the pay bill of the FCÁ and the civilian employees of the DoD. Whether this is for the purposes of either hiding or inflating one or the other, I haven’t yet figured out.