I want to raise in the House today some of the questions that the Taoiseach brought up in his meeting in the White House yesterday with President Trump. First, I congratulate the Taoiseach because that was a very difficult environment to be in and he acquitted himself well, given the circumstances.

The Taoiseach has rightly raised questions, as has the Tánaiste, about the legitimacy of the current air campaign on Iran. It is a humanitarian catastrophe and an environmental catastrophe and as much as we despise the regime and how repugnant it is, what has happened here is that President Trump has torn up the international rules-based order. He is acting outside of the United Nations mandate and contrary to the international laws and conventions of armed conflict.

One of the points the Taoiseach made during his visit was that we are committed to that rules-based order and I applaud that sentiment. Why, if that is the case, would we step back from the United Nations and the UN Security Council and remove the triple lock? Now is not the time to stand back and push back on the UN. It is a choice of the Irish people, a sovereign choice of these Houses, that we be bound by the multilateral principles of the triple lock, and we are making a fundamental error in removing that. Reputation takes decades, hundreds of years, to create. Notoriety can happen overnight.

We criticise the United States for entering a conflict without a UN Security Council mandate, yet at the same time we hold the contradictory view that we do not need a UN Security Council mandate any more to deploy our own troops to what will be hostile environments. I am asking that we have a debate in this House about the necessity to put a referendum to the people to enshrine our military neutrality in the Constitution because when our neutrality is gone, as the advertisement says, it is gone.