Sinead Gibney

First of all, it is not reform.

This legislation that is being proposed removes the triple lock.

It does not replace the UN mandate with anything that is meaningfully comparable.

It cites the principles of the UN Charter, but the legal mechanism of the UN mandate is removed by this legislation.

Fianna Fáil campaigned in saying that they wanted to reform it.

Fine Gael didn't even mention it in their mandate, by the way.

And in the programme for government is where we saw this wording around protection of neutrality, which is not happening.

And this government, I mean, I used a word for the first time.

In the Dáil recently, where I described the government's position on neutrality as bollocksology.

And the reason I say that is because they seem to hold that they support neutrality whilst they're trying to remove the triple lock.

They say that the triple lock is not core to Irish neutrality, which again, I mean, the Taoiseach saying this in 2013, we were neutral before the triple lock because we didn't need the triple lock.

When we negotiated on the Nice and Lisbon treaties, it was clear that we had a threat of being pulled into a European Defence Union.

So the Irish people said that for that future protection, we wanted a UN mandate for the deployment of troops so that we wouldn't be pulled into it.

That moment has now come where we are being pulled into European Defence Union.

And just on this issue that we are being...

alarmist in saying that the government want to engage in other military activity.

We took troops out of the Golan Heights, which were being put into EU battle groups.

It is clear from the government's actions that they have no longer any interest in maintaining our long-held tradition of peacekeeping.

They want to engage in military action at European level.

No, it's not renewing UNIFIL.