Tom Clonan

Good morning, Clare.

Well, I mean, I would welcome the passage of this legislation.

I just saw the Shannon schedule.

I think it's going through to committee stage on Wednesday.

It's a miscellaneous provisions bill to just enhance the powers of enforcement that the Naval Service had have.

So so just for the listeners, Ireland has a huge maritime footprint.

We have almost 1 million square kilometres of maritime domain that we patrol for the European Union.

880,000 square kilometres.

It's 15% of the EU's waters.

And where we are on the western fringe, you have this basically a continuing rotating convoy of what are called shadow fleet tankers, you know, breaching the oil embargo and assisting Vladimir Putin in his kind of war machine against Ukraine.

Yeah, I think Minister McEntee is sending a signal to our European partners that we're taking our defence seriously.

Now, unfortunately, the reality is that for such a large maritime domain,

we only at the moment have two naval vessels that can deploy to sea.

And so there are challenges there for us.

I mean, a lot of this activity, the Russian Shadow Fleet activity, is taking place in the Atlantic, off the west and southwest of the Irish coast.

But we also have, after President Zelensky's visit last December, we had an alleged industrial-grade drone incident off Hoth.

on the incoming flight path of aircraft coming into Dublin Airport.

So that means that we probably will have to have a naval presence off the capital during many of the kind of keynote events, just to assist in the security of our airspace and maritime domain there.

So that means, you know, you have one vessel then off the west coast to monitor the Russian shadow fleet and one vessel on the east, you know, to participate in a combined security operation with Angarda Sheikhan and the Air Corps.

Yeah, and there is an ambitious plan of investment that's underway.