 Mae'n gweithio gyd, gweithio'n gweithio'r cyffredinol, mae'n gweithio lle'n gweithio'r llyfr, ond yw'r gweithio yn fwyfawr. Mae'n fwyfawr i gweithio'n gweithio, ac yn gweithio'n gweithio, gweithio'r gweithio'r Seneddur Elain Conway-Moe. Mae'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r Seneddur yn y 1rhaeddoedd. iawn beth am y mae gen i'r llwyddon ar y Ffarslliaeth Ffarssu ac yna arwain y Chyffyngrif Nad oedd ymgyrch yn Gymru i Seftember 2018. Efallai, yn y Cymraeg mũ oedd y Num yr Rheon Menysgr café'r rhagor i'r rhagor o'r llwyddon yn y rhai. Mae'r rhagor i'r rhagor yn gweithio'r ddiwedd gyfan arweithwyr bwysig gan ynddod yn yr Llyfr Gweithglusiol a chynnal i'r rhagor yn Gweithwyr I rhi'r rhagor yn y rhagor i'r rhagor i'r rhagor. will be familiar in that context to a number of people here. She has a master philosophy from Trinity College Dublin and a degree in management from Ulster University. So it's quite hard to find anybody who is so well rounded in Irish, an experience of Irish history. She was also President of the Democratic Association of French Citizens abroad in Ireland a sicrhau mewn bwysig iawn y ffordd. Mae'n unedig ffroffesor ac yn ymddiolion Llangwyr dros dechreu y DIT, Yw'r Dweud yw'r Fylo. Felly mae'r ffroffaeth ymddir yw'r ffroffaeth ymddir ymddir yw'r ffordd yn cyfnodol, mae'r gweithio ynghylch yn ysgolwch. Mae'r gweithio ymddir yw'r gweithio ymddir yw'r gweithio Foundations himself, where you will have to have in this very foundation since October 2015. There are a number of others of easily even as I could give you but for the long time we would be here. She will speak to you on a subject of considerable interest or also certain amount of confusion to people interested in this area of EU and European affairs, a European defence, the challenge of strategic autonomy. Mae'r ddod yn eu cyfnod y byddwch a chyma o'r ddod yng nghydfyrdd gyda'r ffrangosol a'r collig, sydd yn ddod i'r ddod, ym mwyaf o'r ddod, a'r ddod i'r ddod i'r ddod i'r ddod i ymmwysg wyf. A'r ddod i'r ddod ymddangos, mae'n fawr i ni'n ddod i'r ddod o'r ddodion o'r ddod, o'r ddod i'r ddod i'r ddod i'r ddod i'r ddod i'r ddod i'r ddod. The Strategic Autonomy is a subject of considerable interest because very few people as you make a point understand what is meant by the Strategic Autonomy. It's used very frequently in European discourse with European defence on the EU of Defence for the EU. Lots of various interpretations are floating around there, and even as recently as Ursula von der Lyon's address to the European Parliament, she was also speaking about that we need to move towards the European Defence Union. Strategic autonomy I think also causes certain concern and fear because much of it I think has developed in recent years as a result of the US reluctance to or on a certain difficulties with NATO and member states who rely very heavily on NATO make the point that strategic autonomy may indeed challenge NATO and lead to a US pull out of Europe which is not in most people's interest, certainly not the European Defence Union. So we really await your study and your address. The address will be on the record or the vice president and afterwards we will have a question and answers which will be on the basis of Chatham House rules which is that you can indicate you can avail of the knowledge but not to indicate where it came from or the person involved and I would ask you if you could turn off your phones if they're not already turned off but you can feel free to treat under IIEA. So the floor is yours, Madam Vice President and we look forward. That would be nice to me as well. It's all right if yours goes off. I know it's not anybody else's. So please. Well thank you very much. Thank you very much for the invitation. It's a real pleasure for me to be back to Dublin but to be back to the Institute where I had a great pleasure and privilege to work with people such as Brendan Halligan and Jill Donahoe. So that is the personal note to say that I'm back to see all friends and known faces but I'm not going to mention them all except maybe for Tony as that may take up all my speaking time. To tell you also that I'm very honoured to present to you the work that I have carried out with my co-reporter over a six-month period in the Senate. We take time to work. That brought us to seven European capital cities. Now they all deserve the force to be visited but in six months that was quite difficult especially because this report was on top of the daily parliamentary work that we were doing and we had over a hundred hearings which led us to the very modest number of 12 proposals but we chose to concentrate on what we felt could be implemented rather than attempting to provide a prospective analysis and we're pleased to see that our number two proposal is already implemented with the creation of a general directorate for defence and space that will oversee the new European defence point. We also felt that defence ought to be treated at the political level and deserved to appear not simply as a subdivision of foreign affairs but be considered as an entity of its own. We're pleased to see that one of the new commissioners portfolio includes defence and that the parliament has a subcommittee for defence. We're still of course 11 proposals to go but I think this is a good start. What we wanted basically was to help raise the profile of defence issues within the institutions. The report was adopted on the 3rd of July and in our ambition to share it it was made available in English and in French and we translated it in the languages of all the visited countries. So I have brought with me and the ambassador has the bag beside him a few copies of the report and the resume that was made of it but when embarking on our work we were surprised by the very large number of reports and studies of very high quality published proof that there was a growing interest in the topic particularly in France but to be useful we had to bring something new and we attempted to be novel both in the approach and in our conclusions. We adopted the listening mode which surprised most of our interlocutors more used to France proposing if not imposing. We therefore set off to test the motivation of our European partners in the building of a European defence to ascertain their relationship with NATO and gather their threat analysis. When preparing this talk I felt that it was important to take into account that there was addressing an audience on a politically sensitive subject in fact doubly sensitive as where we will be talking about European defence and strategic autonomy and I'm perfectly conscious that the topic may not be central to public debate in Ireland but it will be difficult to be otherwise in a neutral non-aligned country but in international relations if neutrality is a means to avoid becoming involved in other states wars it comes with two main obligations to provide credible defence against any belligerant and the second obligation is to adopt a position of impartiality between them. It therefore implies giving oneself the means to protect and defend one's neutrality and therefore having some interest in military matters as it is obviously the case if you're here today but it is also the case with Ireland's long-term involvement in peacekeeping missions which is another very good example and missions that are highly regarded everywhere and commanded. In the time that I have I would like to cover three points and leave time then to the questions and the debate. From our hearings abroad and coverage of the large literature I was referring to we drew three groups of countries taking into account their public opinion as well as their official position not always necessarily being in line. The first group I will call a tentlicist. It wants the EU to avoid taking over the responsibilities of NATO not duplicating the alliance's activities. It would like the EU to focus mainly on crisis management. It is concentrated on a threat coming essentially from Russia. This was increased of course by the annexation of Crimea, the intervention in Ukraine and the constant show of force around all the borders of Europe through an air and naval presence to which maybe we could add its disinformation and cyber attack activities. This group includes mainly countries on the east and northern part of Europe as well as the United Kingdom especially following the Scripall affair. These countries view a continued American presence in Europe essential and are deeply disturbed in periods of tension between the two continents. The second group believes in strengthening European decision making capabilities and geopolitical influence without questioning the current role of NATO in the protection of the continent. It believes in strengthening European countries' credibility as security actors and eventually allies who can take up the fair share of collective defence. This group is focused on terrorist threat coming from the south. It includes mainly countries in southern Europe including France. The third group of countries considers that they are not under any threat. This is the case of Austria for instance and I would think Ireland. It is due to their strategically secure geographical location this goes for Ireland and to their history for others. It is therefore crucial to take into account these divergent positions and also urgent to overcome these divisions if we are to move forward as a collective. We must pay careful attention to the needs of all our partners to be as inclusive as possible if we want to secure their involvement. The second major point I would like to cover is the relationship between the EU and NATO. A series of declarations by the American president about the use of NATO even questioning its very existence and threatening to pull out of it on a few occasions followed by his revisiting of the activation of article 5 of the Treaty of Washington taking at the time Montenegro as the example of a country that the US would not protect have sent a tremor of fear through northern and eastern Europe and Poland in particular. Part of Europe believes that we are facing an openly hostile US president that has gone as far as declaring the EU to be a foe. The deterioration of the transatlantic relationship has pushed Europeans into an existential crisis. The rise of an interventionist Russia and an inquisitively assertive China are adding to the growing anxiety in some parts of Europe. While it seems obvious that economic concerns motivate US criticism of European efforts starting with the long standing burden sharing of our security and the equally long standing criticism of our lack of financial efforts in the matter some countries prefer to appease the US by investing massively in the purchase of American army equipment and I discovered that the EU is actually the largest market for the US sales of army equipment well before the Middle East and thus weakening the possibility of a European capabilities integration. Poland is even going as far as proposing to build a fort trump. Thus the opposition of these countries to anything that may antagonize the Americans most reject the concept of strategic autonomy which remains unclear and contentious and should not be used lightly. We observed that many misunderstandings arise from linguistic and semantic differences as most political leaders today express themselves on international issues primarily addressing their own people. They need to be aware that their speeches may have detrimental consequences abroad. Our own president Emmanuel Macron freely uses the term of strategic autonomy which in France doesn't cause any problem because everybody has the same understanding of it but we noticed that in a last speech that he made he talked about strategic responsibilities which obviously has a different meaning. Yes we live in the world where information is now shared globally instantly and without being controlled this is why for example we immediately with my co-reporter discarded the concept of a European army which to us is both utopian and a counterproductive project when we noted the concern of our partners. Most actually regard strategic autonomy as a move towards strategic independence from the US and here I think we reached the core of the problem with so far an old win for the US who succeeds in dividing the Europeans. Under the cover of NATO it is the bilateral relationship with the US that is in question. The increasingly tense relationship between Berlin and Washington with Donald Trump openly condemning Germany has led the German media and public to recently consider a shared strategic culture with a more efficient spending and interoperability in national defence capabilities as a way to prepare for a future in which the US may be less engaged with Europe than it is now and here is where German views coincide with the current French thinking. For the past few decades we have all lived in denial of the growing lack of interest for Europe from a strategic point of view for the US whose attention is now concentrating more on China. At the same time, en même temps that's a new French talk because we kept considering that we were the American's prime ally European countries did not provide for their own defence with the exception of the UK and France and even in these countries their defence budget decreased over time to be stabilised in France for the first time in 2015 and the defence budgets were used in most countries up to a few years ago to provide funds for other more pressing needs in the national budgets. Nevertheless a lot of projects actually exist in Europe and work well. Most have been set up on a bilateral basis. Other cooperation agreements that involved between two to ten states fall under what we call mini-lateralism. However, most remain unknown to the majority of European citizens maybe because it is not happening in the shape of a formal master plan but in a form of a progressive cumulative and multifaceted developments. We collectively I think suffer in Europe from being prone to concentrating on our weaknesses rather than our strengths. Now we'd like to say a few words about the UK which may be of interest to you as we visit them to us as well as we visited London and we met many British delegations in Paris. In fact I think we have never had so many visits in Paris and paid them so many visits and this is in line with what director of the European Defence Agency told us in Brussels when we were there for the 48 hours that brought us to all the other cities he said that he was quite impressed by the renewed interest for European projects by Britain since voting for Brexit. First of all from these various meetings I would say that the UK views European strategic autonomy as a contentious goal which may be linked to the current confusion about Brexit and the country's future role in Europe. It appears to welcome the strengthening of military capabilities only if it can contribute more to NATO but does not support member states growing closer to one another if it is to be excluded from defence projects as a future non-EU member. The current debate about allowing third countries having access to the new European defence fund was initially about ensuring the participation of British companies in future defence innovation and development plans. It now has opened a row with our American friends who also want to have access to the fund, contributed exclusively and for the first time such a fund exists by European taxpayers money. Because of its historical partnership with the US Britain appears to fear any weakening of the transatlantic alliance but the current Trump's administration on clear and unpredictable position aggravates their own. As regard Brexit we believe that we need to put in place whether the UK leaves with or without an agreement a solid future cooperation agreement. One of the possible consequences of Brexit may be the negative economic impact on the defence budget already under severe financial pressure in Britain. The British government may then favour to remain attached to PESCO to the CSDP missions and to the European defence agency by continuing their active participation in various projects. France would like to see the UK anchored to the European continent as they may be leaving us but geographically they are not moving anywhere. They remain one of our closest partner both in operational and industrial defence cooperation. The third point I would like to make is about the growing awareness that we need to build our confidence and be strong enough to resist being drawn into a potential new conflict which will not be ours. The increasing diplomatic tensions between the US and China is of great concern to us. It started suddenly and in a very brutal manner with the commercial war in line I suppose with President Trump's way of doing business but I am convinced that any other American president would have reacted equally maybe in a different fashion but equally to the challenge of the current American world leadership China is now openly contesting. In the Iraq war France was able to stand up and refused to follow the US but it now doubts that it would be able to do the same on such an issue if it were to arise. Likewise much broader issues such as the new hybrid wars or the militarisation of space need European responses. We believe that no country on its own can face up to them alone. As the US appears to be changing its view on alliances and rule based multilateralism there is a growing belief that Europe up to take a stronger geopolitical role and support programmes such as the permanent structured cooperation, the European defence fund and the European intervention initiative which now has 13 members I think from last week having been launched only last year. France remains the leading proponent of European strategic autonomy as it sees it as a continuation of its concept of national strategic autonomy. This explains why President Macron speaks freely of European sovereignty as part of what he calls a Europe that protects. ESA that's European strategic autonomy for France is based on freedom of decision making and autonomy of action in conducting operations. It proposed the European intervention initiative to enable participating countries to develop a strategic culture by working on potential operational scenarios. For France, European strategic autonomy is compatible with NATO and is not about strategic independence. It is about the continent being simply capable of ensuring the protection of its security interests and to conclude I will say that our fast changing and unpredictable world forces us to act and to act now not just for the environment but for our security and security of our citizens. With the main powers namely the US and China in a leadership race and Russia wanting to assert its place again on the international scene Europe could end up being the playing ground of these powers or it can decide to be strong enough to remain independent and have the means to defend its sovereignty in the same way as one has to defend one's neutrality. The question of its security has been central to its conception whether our governments make it a priority or not will determine our future role in the world we're all aware that we are at a turning point the question is being asked and we simply need to choose the answer we're going to give and I thank you for your attention.