Arthur Morgan
Question:192 Mr. Morgan asked the Minister for Foreign Affairs the role he sees for Ireland in the evolving EU defence industry; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [23893/03]
Written Answers. - Defence Industry.
Ireland is not a producer of armaments and is only a small producer of other defence equipment.
The European defence equipment sector has been undergoing change and restructuring since the end of the Cold War. A number of factors have influenced this change and restructuring, including a general decrease in defence budgets, the lessening of state financial involvement in national defence sectors, the impact of rapid technological change on manufacturing and development costs, as well as the nature of modern military equipment. These have given impetus to a shift in the sector towards efforts to share costs and reduce the current patterns of wasteful expenditure in the defence sector.
Proposals for EU activity in the field of armaments co-operation, including by means of an "armaments agency", have arisen intermittently over the past number of decades. The Amsterdam and Nice treaties provide that co-operation in the armaments area should be "as member states consider appropriate". This enables Ireland to takes our own decisions on these matters, in so far as they affect our concerns.
Most recently, in June 2003, the Thessaloniki European Council tasked "the appropriate bodies of the EU to undertake necessary actions towards creating, in the course of 2004, an intergovernmental agency in the field of defence capabilities development, research, acquisition and armaments". This initiative has been influenced in part by a desire to improve the cost-effectiveness of defence procurement expenditure, partially by achieving economies of scale in purchasing. The agency is also projected to play a role in advancing the harmonisation and inter-operability of defence equipment in support of European security and defence policy, which is aimed at giving the EU the capability to undertake crisis management and humanitarian tasks.
Co-operation in the area of military capabilities and armaments is seen as an integral part of the EU's efforts to address shortfalls so as to properly equip the EU rapid reaction force to carry out humanitarian and crisis management missions, not least from the perspective of protecting the forces themselves, as well as those they may be trying to help.
One example of such humanitarian and crisis management mission was the short-duration military stabilisation operation undertaken in Bunia in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which aimed at ameliorating a situation of serious violence and great humanitarian distress and concluded in September. Another example is the separate military monitoring operation in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, which contributed to defusing a potential crisis situation from escalating out of control and is expected to conclude shortly.