 Fel ei chael'r cyfrifio hwn ar ei ddweud, honno unrhyw gwybod ei ddiwgol yn gyd. Rwy'n nhw'n deursio i gyd, a bod yn ni weithio'r adnodd honno'n unigodd. Mae'r ffordd wedi'u rydyn ni wedi gweithio hefyd ar gyffredinol gwybod o'r hwyl yng Nghymru a dweud e'r Rhwng. A gwneud o'r £1.5 a'i rydym yn ffawswyr o'r cyfrifio sydd i'r ddaid yng Nghymru, a unrhyw gael i Gylio'r dynnal i Maria Mhwriadau yn ein hwn gyda Llywodraeth yn gwybod yr unig ifanc hynny. Mae'n amlwg iawn i'r wrthynod ffordd y Ff Smith Cymru, ac mae'n gwybodaeth yng Nghymru, ac mae'r Gwylio'r ffordd o'r gwybodaeth yn y lle'r unig. Mae angen weithio'r gwawyr o'r gêm, gan unrhyw gweithio'n llawer o eu hyfforddiadau. Mae'n amlwg iawn erbyn, dinnerpiece, which was published last year by the Central International Cooperation at New York University. It's a real testament to the confidence of the professionals, the deep thinking of all those institutions that they really welcome debate and dialog on the future of Irish and UN peacekeeping. I learned immensely from the research experience over two years. I want to go back very briefly to my early, star-eyed, post-graduate days a Llyfrgell Cymru yn 2004. Rwy'n meddwl i'n ddweud i'r drwyll yn Llyfrgell i London yn unrhyw ymgyrch yn y grwp yn ymddi'r drwyll John Macinlay, unrhyw ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch, a'r cymdeithaseth yma yn yr unrhyw gyda'r ysgolwyr ymgyrch yn y grwp. Mae'r gweithio am y gwasanaeth ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch. Mae'n eu gotfwyll yw'r ffordd, a rydyn ni'n gweithio i'ch ffordd i Europio, sydd eich mynd pan oedd yn diolch yn rhanio gyda'r cyfrifio. Fy gydw i'ch gweithio'r gweithio'r cyfrifio gyda'r Unedol, ac yn dweud i'ch eich mynd i'r cyfrifio i Europio cyfrifio gyda unigol, llei'n cyfrifio cyfrifio gyda'r unedol. Gweithio'r cyfrifio gyfoedd yn gwneud yn ddiweddarion. Dwy'r rai cyfrifio'r cyfrifio'r ymgylch yn from 34,000 to over 100,000, approximately 100,000, 607,000, but there is a persistent malaise and European skepticism towards UN structures and operations who constitute a tiny part of these overall numbers. Indeed, I'd say that Ireland isn't immune from this malaise and the skepticism about UN structures and the ability of the UN to reform itself. We don't have to look what happened last week in terms of there are some positive green shoots in terms of natural countries looking again at UN deployments. Canada is now talking about going to South Sudan, certainly going to Mali in terms of increasing the numbers of troops there, and you can see in terms of what is going on in South Sudan, the importance of peacekeeping as a sort of the political hard edge of the United Nations presence in difficult places and keeping the peace in exceptionally trying circumstances. However, to set the scene, I want to sort of in terms of looking at the first trend which is looking at the Irish public sort of perception of peacekeeping. I want to sort of go back more than, well, more than 50 years right back to 1960 when we deployed it to the Congo as part of the UN mission to Congo there, or UNOC. And if you look in terms of how Irish peacekeepers were perceived during this period, it was very much a republic image close to that of missionaries, albeit peace missionaries were sort of minimal weapons for self-protection under chapter 6. Professor Hustrawn has very interestingly wrote about how today British soldiers have been excessively eulogised as victims, and this, to use an old academic chessman phrase, agency, reduces their agency to proactively do things. If you only see them as as definite victims and it's always been set up to be victims, then you limit your willingness to deploy them in dangerous and difficult places to do dangerous and difficult things. So he says that we need to be careful about how we sort of over eulogise military service and seeing them as victims. And I would say this is a trend that has long afflicted the defence forces. And if you look back, for example, at the Niemba ambush, the first major jolt of consciousness when it comes to the dangers of peacekeeping among the Irish public, you will see that the Irish media coverage at the time reported that many members of the platoon threw down their weapons and reached for their rosary beads, and this was seen as a good thing. However, the response by the military at the time was very, very good, but by the way there was no evidence for this. This was sort of conjured up by, I would say, a few journalists. But in terms of the two survivors certainly didn't talk about this. But in terms of how the military responded, you could see that Colonel Pat Curran, who was the, when he spoke to the outgoing officers and men of the 34th battalion going after the 33rd of which Niemba, the soldiers of the casualties from Niemba came from, Colonel Pat Curran gave a very, some called it a red face and angry speech in Athlone. He said that soldiers should never forget their security drill. If they were sent to clear a roadblock, they should never be caught off guard. If attacked, they should know exactly what to do and not be caught by surprise. And so, I suppose what I'm getting at here is that the military have always had a high degree of professionalism in terms of how they see themselves. They never particularly wanted to be seen as victims. They wanted to do a job. They wanted to secure their perimeter. They wanted to make sure that they knew their security drill and if they were attacked, they'd be ready for it. So this could have been a very juxtaposition between how the public saw the event and how the military saw the event, at least some military officers. By contrast, the Minister for Defence at the time, Kevin Gleeson, was sort of uninterested in the details of Niemba. He was asked as to why this happened. And indeed, one military officer said that, well, it wasn't particularly a surprise. The Irish were clearing roadblocks of which Belgian mercenaries were using, of roads in which Belgian mercenaries were using the roads to go and burn down Baluba villages and kill Baluba civilians. So, by clearing the roadblocks, essentially, they were seeing as betting the Belgians, which wasn't necessarily a good thing in that part of the Congo at the time. But however, Minister for Defence Kevin Gleeson said that ultimately this was the work of savages and that the Congo was on a manifest path to a destiny of peace and that the Irish soldiers were helping them to get there and know the detail was necessary. This wasn't exactly an informed political approach to thinking about the Congo at the time, indeed, the difficult position as to why only white troops were acceptable in that part of the Congo. And indeed, Diolch on my school, the UN Secretary General, had agreed that only white troops would serve in Gatanga at Belgium and the United States in the UK's behest. So there's a wider political context here that the Irish Government and, I would say, the Iraqis weren't looking at. And indeed, even if we go on to Lebanon, in terms of operational scrutiny or parliamentary scrutiny or government scrutiny of detail, something to be desired as well. It took a number of decades before, for example, the deaths of Corporal Finnton, Hennigan, Private Manics Armstrong and Private Thomas Walsh were looked at by Frank Callan and the Senior Council. And indeed, he reported that there were some aspects of the standard operating procedures and intelligence at the time that could have been perhaps better done. Some mistakes could have been learned from earlier in the Irish deployment. So whereas Irish officers who served in Lebanon have always long spoken about mistakes, ways to improve what they did, and indeed learned from such mistakes, no formal acknowledgement was ever forthcoming, really, of any serious problems in command and control, counter-ID preparations, equipments, ordinance, etc. And generally, with some honourable exceptions, the Iraqis was almost completely uninterested in such questions in the past. Even in sort of, you know, Oakley incidents, for example, the 2002 abuse of miners in Eritrea on the On Me or the UN mission in Ethiopia in Eritrea, this was kind of officially dismissed as a rotten apple or two. But it has been acknowledged by a number of officers I spoke to who were around at the time. This was more of a sort of battalion wide problem than was perhaps acknowledged at the time. And if you think that this happened to the British Army in Iraq or something, or in Afghanistan in 2003, there would certainly have been a parliamentary inquiry into that. You get to the bottom of exactly how this culture and how these problems have managed to manifest themselves. But we sort of, you know, I suppose what I'm suggesting here is sometimes the mantra of peace and the keeping of peace is sort of a comfortable blanket of which we can sort of put over our operations, which leads to sort of some comfortable speeches about the wonderful things indeed that we do do, but perhaps also sort of limit then the willingness or desire for robust scrutiny in terms of operation performance, and indeed making sure that that we learn from, we publicly acknowledge and learn from each operation. And that is a healthy, it should be a healthy tension there between on the civilian side, you know, constantly scrutinising multiple performance and then trying to help to learn from mistakes, improve whether that's the purchase of equipment, whether that's changing or the further funding of training exercises, whether that's the provision of whatever extra officers are needed, soldiers are needed to do difficult tasks. So I would say that however this 20th century trend of political and public disinterest in closely monitoring the operation of details of peacekeeping are coming to an end, and I would say that the number of points which I would like to talk about today. First of all the general maintenance of professional standards in the Irish Defence Forces is quite unique given the lack of parliamentary or public probity or interest in such standards, and there's very worthy PhD thesis possibly to be done with this. An already high level professionalism has accelerated of late, and indeed Ireland's membership of NATO partnership for peace since 1999 has transformed the Defence Forces. Irish officers like all professional members that are cast want to train and deploy with the best, and this for many Irish officers today means NATO. Indeed the tilt towards NATO has gone so far that many of the Irish officers that we interviewed were unaware of some of the detail of recent UN doctrinal innovations. So for example New Horizons, you mentioned that to a number of officers, they didn't really know what was in it. Whereas if you talked about the most recent NATO standard operating procedures, absolutely clear on NATO exercises, clear on exactly what NATO standards were. When it comes to something of the large amount of UN paperwork on doctrine that's produced by both the Department of Field Support and the Department of Peacekeeping operations, well there was perhaps less knowledge about this and that struck us as surprising. I would say second there is now evidence that Irish public attitudes previously uninterested in operational details is much more casual to averse now when it comes to UN operations than was ever the case in the past and that this is being reflected in turn by the Irish government. Third, the Department of Defence has emerged as a thinking department as evidenced by the well articulated white paper on defence, possibly the first time Ireland has produced a paper on security that can be considered truly strategic. Indeed Ireland's contribution at the EU and NATO level is evolving. It is demanding an unprecedented policy response and the Department of Defence is generally rising to the challenge. Fourth, the increased role of DOD is not without some inter-departmental tension including between the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Department of Defence, but this is again generally healthy for policymaking. It's good to have two departments rubbing up against each other with sort of defence favouring a certain policy choice versus the Department of Foreign Affairs favouring another. However, if there's no cabinet minister for defence it obviously tilts the balance a little bit too much perhaps where you don't have a senior political leader then sort of articulating the defence line and that sort of it can unbalance things a little bit. So the dialogue on national security and danger is becoming as I say slightly unbalanced there in terms of foreign affairs preferences. The Department of Defence appears to favour stronger NATO engagement and war deployments as part of combined European battalions. The DFA is sort of coming around to this idea but has long sort of favoured more traditional UN deployments and indeed the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade pushed hard for the 2013 UNDOF deployment to Syria while the Department of Defence was largely well to some degree a bit more hesitant. However in the minds of at least some Irish defence officials and indeed defence forces officers experience in Syria has highlighted two important shifts in Irish defence. First Irish military standards and duty of care at Irish soldiers is much higher than it was in the 1990s and two UN structures are not keeping pace with these expectations. So very briefly let's look at what went wrong in UNDOF of late. Well looking at one incident and perhaps the most famous incident in terms of the Irish quick response force rolled in in UNDOF on August 30th 2014 Irish peacekeepers in Syria came under attack from Al Qaeda's affiliate Jabhat al Nusra. Al Nusra had already kidnapped 45 Fijian soldiers and seized UN disengagement or UNDOF bases weapons and equipment and then now they surrounded, fired upon and demanded the surrender of two of the UN positions manned by Filipino peacekeepers. Irish soldiers successfully relieved the encircled Filipino peacekeepers in vacuuming 93 personnel while maintaining their own security in a tense and highly volatile environment. However a war of words then broke out as we know between the UN force commander and the Filipino government over whether Filipino troops disobeyed in order to surrender to Al Nusra. Meanwhile the UN was forced to negotiate with an Al Qaeda group in order to gain the release of the Fijian troops who were released on the 11th of September. Qatar as we know negotiated their release and as an Israeli politician observed were Qatar negotiates there's always money and a lot of it. So in terms of UNDOF well it hasn't regained its lost positions in the Syrian Bravo sign lying off the disengagement zone and to some degree this was an embarrassment in terms of command UN commander control having this very public spat between the Philippines and the senior officers from the Filipino military and the UN force commander over who said and did what. And for many European countries including the Austrian chancellor he said well we told you so we told you this was going to happen so that's why we drew our troops it was obvious this mission was a mess. So UN peacekeepers were essentially harassed occasionally kidnapped over two years by Syrian rebel fighters to enforce a mandate that to some degree had been rendered impossible to put in place I mean complaints are made about Jabhat al-Nusra by the UN to the Syrian government saying why don't you do something about Jabhat al-Nusra targeting our troops well. I mean I'm not a fan of the Syrian government they said we're a bit busy at the moment and oddly enough they're sort of beating us in many areas of southwest south west Syria so it was sort of an out-of-date mandate with out-of-date structures and unworkable command and control ultimately when it came to dealing with crisis situations. So I would say that this has been a pretty difficult experience for the Defence Forces and for the UN and indeed at the time Minister for Defence Simon Coveney said that this showed that from now on Ireland is going to have a much more strict conditions-based approach for iris contingents following debates in Undof in Syria. And if we look at some of the statements that came from Minister of State Paul Keogh recently when it came to the deployment of iris troops to Mali he said iris soldiers are all deployed and will be safe jobs and will not be active in danger zones. This isn't good particularly I would argue for in terms of getting a job done just to stay in safe zones to this sort of casualty aversion isn't necessarily I don't think what professionals want and so I think we need to have more dialogue about what risks we're willing to take, what UN reforms we need in terms of duty of care, in terms of thinking about role 2 hospitals etc in terms of how retrievable are our soldiers from adverse situations, but simply saying that we're only going to send our soldiers to safe areas, relatively safe areas and not to dangerous areas is not a positive message, not a positive dialogue we need to have with the Irish populace as a whole I would argue and indeed with the Iraqis. Looking briefly then at some of the problems and I don't have time really to get into some to many of the areas of report that we published last year but looking briefly at command and control issues of which many we talked to a number of Irish officers, a large amount of Irish officers about their experiences of UN command and control so quickly speaking then about some of the problems that they highlight as well we still have despite the you know various reports on UN reform including the the HIPPO report of last year 2015 that was chaired by Ramos Horta the former president of Tumor Leste and we still have a number of issues in terms of a UN system infighting and one one senior Irish UN official told us that quote the incentives of the UN system are to work for part of the UN against all other parts of the UN capture resources the UN staffer does not work for the UN as a whole he or she cannot see that far the way that the UN is created is funded creates this distortion there is not an incentive to work together instead each agency is in competition for funds the central planning processes needed to reduce this is what DFS Department of Field Support was designed for but some in Department of Peacekeeping operations feel threatened by the DFS role and this is certainly what we found throughout New York the Department of Field Support and DPKO are going through a turf battle that is long-standing and shows no sign of going away and in terms of in EU official also pointed out that DFS does not view its role as being subservient to DPKO and that this huge interagency problems was causing difficulty in terms of European appetites for further commitments to UN peacekeeping. Also was noted that in the case of several UN missions for example a Minercat that was serious disagreement with UN officials over what should be how the mandate should be interpreted so in the case of Minercat UN officials wanted essentially Minercat troops to provide escorts for UN agencies whereas obviously you four and indeed European countries saw a wider scope for the mandate than perhaps UN officials thought and this was never quite resolved to a satisfactory outcome throughout the Irish time of the Irish deployment in Chad and indeed the botched handover in March April 2010 also was frustrating not only for the Irish but was also noted by a number of other European countries in terms of how you know EU UN cooperation was not quite up to up to scratch or where it should be and much blame was put on the UN there fairly or unfairly. In terms of looking at mandates well obviously mandates have for a period after the Brahimi reports in 2000 mandates became much more sort of means tested and orientated however in recent years this means that sort of move away from this the new buzzword is POK you know the protection of civilians. Indeed if you look at the minimal mandate or the UN mission the size of that mandate then you see that there is a large number of tasks to which the peacekeeping peacekeepers are not particularly equipped to do whether it be you know sort of ensuring that gender awareness is sort of prioritised or whether it's it's ensuring that peacekeepers sort of pave the way for successful elections and sometimes yes UN civilian officials should be sort of deployed alongside these missions to sort of take care of these this this range of mandate tasks but often peacekeepers find that they themselves through a similar civil military role or civil affairs role are sort of tasks we're doing these things as well and many countries many troop contributing countries are not capable of doing this so the large scale you know if it's some Asian country simply just ignore you know aspects of the mandate they find that they are not trained or equipped to do that they see as being traditionally civilian tasks so Minisma and the Mali mission is very good broad mandate but whether it's actually really implementable in the whole of its scope is another question and the other problem for the defence forces is that they've had very successful and indeed pleasing experiences of recent NATO peacekeeping missions so for example the mission k4 mission in Kosovo was seen as a model of sort of multi-actor cooperation an excellent concept of operations or co-ops an excellent plan to wind down the mission and gradual transition then to unmic the UN interim administration in Kosovo and so a logical sequential transition and where k4 sort of moved to an aid to the civil power role and so Kosovo because there's NATO experiences have been so good this has kind of led to increased expectations in terms of what our soldiers will then experience in other missions whether those are realistic or not indeed Unifil is a satisfying mission because to some degree the French insisted on remaking it to their image as they as they wanted it so they established things like for example that insisting that a French officer take on in 2006 and need chief of staff role that they sort of remodeled in terms of its terms of duties to be what they would expect in a NATO mission are insisting of establishing a strategic military cell in Unifil that was staffed mostly by European officers much to the chagrin of you know non-aligned movement countries who were sort of used to having a sort of you know an equal role in terms of operation and headquarters but this was very much dominated by Europeans and so the French are sort of quite brash in advancing their own way of doing things as they see fit and this is quite ad hoc can be useful it can also lead to confusion especially when it comes to other TCCs who have a problem with kind of advanced use of intelligence technologies that they don't have such as whether it's UAVs or anything else the establishment of national intelligence cells that they again don't have or don't want to set up so the French have sort of set a template that what people in London right now are saying is is an interesting template the UK is talking about the same thing the message of defence well are you know establishing parallel missions like Lycorin and Côte d'Ivoire for example and then to feeding into the UN mission as necessary as your national interest and indeed your desire to get involved with the UN sort of fluctuates depending on who who else is committed committed to providing troops so it's sort of this have your cake and eaters approach is kind of is quite appealing to some European countries I would say that quite dangerous darling in a way in the short term it's often quite useful but in terms of the overall coherence of peacekeeping we need to make sure that such efforts are formalised that you don't simply sort of rip up the rule book and to rewrite it as necessary you don't sort of you know some of the recent innovations that we've seen such as joint military analysis cells or joint operations centres again the French or whoever it is will sometimes rewrite these or or even the Italians in the Spanish will sort of try and remake these as they see fit as they see as they see as kind of a better model on the ground at the time depending on the force commander depending on key military personnel this is all interesting come innovative it can be useful but it can also lead to confusion especially when the bulk of UN peacekeepers are still obviously not from Europe and therefore can lead to some difficult relations in the mission finally I'll just say that there's also some evidence of civilianisation so for example if you look at a lot of the air assets that are used in in sub-Saharan Africa in very difficult missions such as in the Congo you'll see that some of these are are still contracted out to civilian agencies who fall under an ICAO kind of civilian standards it means they can't really use air assets in a kind of hot conflict because that goes against civilian sort of work rules which is dangerous in terms of you need an Indian you know if an Indian company commander is calling in for a kazovac and suddenly you realize you don't have air assets because it's too hot it's too difficult that doesn't exactly inspire these troops doing very difficult jobs but kind of morale and to you know already they're thinking that you know Indian Pakistani troops for example generally do one UN tour in their whole careers which is a problem actually because in terms of their previous experiences they're obviously learning on the ground but then in terms of risking their men or women's lives well if you're concerned about you know air assets not being you're not being able to draw upon them as a military officer then that's that's obviously quite difficult and I don't think that came out in the recent HIPAA report either we still have problems in terms of sending troops home however there is there are some green shoots out there in terms of you look at the UN stand-away range system that has now been done away with essentially and then we now have the peacekeeping capability readiness system that was introduced in 2015 it shows some signs of improvement on the previous on the previous UNSAS concept we also have the strategic force generation style which is being pushed by the UK and others which again is sort of pooling and allowing for a major European dialogue in terms of moving away from the French kind of ad hoc approaches that I talked about to a more formalized way of getting Europe back into more peacekeeping and I think that you know some of the moves that we've seen from Canada recently some of the conversations that are being had in London despite the dreadful I'll be quite frank besides the you know in terms of the hindrance that Brexit puts upon CSDP and a more European cooperation whether it's the European Defence Agency or CSDP missions etc you know there still are some green shoots out there in terms of trying to get Ireland playing a sort of leading role in trying to move bigger European countries away from possibly doing things for expediency but not actually laying down a blueprint or framework for future cooperation and are you know finding ways to have different levels of UN operations I think there are some there is of some progress noted in the report in terms of trying to look at ways to fix the budget so that more capable assets can be reimbursed for example from the peacekeeping budget so that Europeans are not necessarily out of pocket as they complain they have been in the past intelligence has now been talked about openly is very good thing you can see the use of UAVs very positive in my view in terms intelligence should not be a dirty word it doesn't have to be a negative thing if done properly and carefully with the host country so I think there are some green shoots out there and I'm very much welcome given the sort of the range of immense experience that we have in this room I've tried to be a little bit provocative in trying to talk about the Irish situation the Irish legacy and my sense of again the professionalism and the expertise that Ireland has both in terms of military and the Department of Defence and the Department of Foreign Affairs is that it is very high very engaged possibly in the military side there could be more awareness actually surprisingly even though we thought we wrote the UN peacekeeping book to somebody who we've kind of lost a little bit touch perhaps as we go from more and more pfp training initiatives and NATO standards for the dominating the military training discourse perhaps we need to kind of go back and look again in terms of how we see our input and how we can learn from UN doctrine and advances and the operational level the UN produced a lot of paper not a lot of countries actually operationalise it in terms of how they train their troops for peacekeeping missions and we possibly are also some way to blame for that I think very finally that when it comes to our major flaws that we don't have a proper public discourse about defence in this country so we do have ministers coming out and saying don't worry our soldiers will not be harmed if our soldiers you know I think gathering from the conversations that we've had in terms of professionalism in terms of commitment I think our soldiers do want to be in the difficult areas I think they have been in the difficult areas and the idea that they should only go to as Mr Keogh said the relatively safe areas goes against that long and proud tradition and so I'd argue that only way we can change that is to sort of talk to the Irish public about why they do these difficult jobs why they might possibly take opportunities in the future and why this is absolutely worth it in terms of our contribution to international security