Industrial Development (Amendment) and Miscellaneous Provisions Bill 2026: Report Stage (Resumed) and Final Stage
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-30
============================================================

Sinéad Gibney (SD), Dublin Rathdown

I want to speak first to some of the comments that have been made. It is so crazy to think that this legislation has nothing to do with dual-use goods, which is essentially the premise that has been put forward so far by the Minister of State. This is literally money for dual-use and it goes even further and allows Ireland to invest money in single-use. That is what the Government is doing. He also spoke about how it is easier for these institutions and State agencies to meet their objectives but if we are allowing them to engage with military purpose industry, they cannot be doing a very good job. If what we need is to pivot towards military use then we genuinely need to look at what the IDA and Enterprise Ireland are doing.
Amendment No. 7 proposes to retain subsection (5) of section 8 of the Science and Technology Act 1987, which requires Government approval for engaging in activities of military relevance. The subsection states:
The Agency shall not engage in or promote any activity of a primarily military relevance without the prior approval of the Government.
The Minister of State could not accept our earlier amendments, which provided for guardrails to prevent the State investing in the military industry. The provision in the Bill to delete this subsection of the 1987 Act knocks down any facade in that regard. Deleting this line facilitates exactly such investment. The Minister of State cannot continue to spin a story that this is not about investment in the military industry, a move towards militarisation or pivoting our economy towards military investment.
Ultimately, we do not know the consequences of the goods or technologies that could be produced under this legislation. The Bill as it stands ensures that such decisions will have no Government oversight and that IDA Ireland and Enterprise Ireland will be fully free to use supports that could be used to help a local agricultural business or a new retail shop or service company to support companies engaging in military activities, a sector that is already extremely profitable and the recipient of millions of euro of additional funding, particularly in recent years. We know that military goods are designed to be used in war and conflict. They are designed for violence and, often, to maim and kill. In an effort to widen what is an acceptable use of taxpayer money, we risk victims of violence and conflict coming back to us to ask why the weapons, technology, goods and services used to hurt them were stamped with "Made in Ireland".
Additional evidence of this is found in an article in The Journal a couple of weeks ago detailing the comments by the Minister of State, Deputy Thomas Byrne, at an event in Strasbourg. Asked by the journalist whether there was a risk of Ireland having to contribute billions of euro to European defence spending, the Minister of State declined to endorse a specific figure, stating "I'm not going to go into figures like that because some of these figures can be bandied about." The article goes on to state:
However, Byrne acknowledged the broader concern.
He said Irish businesses have traditionally benefited when European countries increase spending on infrastructure and other major projects.
"That’s not the case with defence spending, because we don’t have a defence industry of any significance," Byrne said.
He said there are Irish companies operating in the sector and that the government is trying to increase their involvement so that "there’s an economic benefit back" to Ireland.
Byrne said the government is changing legislation to allow Enterprise Ireland to advise companies in the defence sphere, while a new security clearance system will allow Irish companies to participate in European consortiums competing for defence contracts.
Nobody in the Government is trying to hide what it is doing, yet the Minister of State, Deputy Dillon, comes in here and suggests to us that we are conflating issues and being disingenuous. This is exactly why the Irish public grappled with the Nice and Lisbon treaties. It is exactly why we need to be active members of the European Union, consistently and constantly pushing for the upholding of the founding values of the Union of social justice and peace. That is what the Government is absolutely happy to leave in the dust while it trots forward on the path to militarisation, down which the EU is hell-bent on going. I have been mocked by the Minister of State's colleagues for using words like that and describing the situation as such but every piece of evidence makes clear to me that this is exactly what is happening and that the Government is not only not resisting it but happily embracing it.
I questioned two Commissioners at a meeting of the European affairs committee in January. They further confirmed all of this. The multi-annual financial framework is being redesigned to support defence spending, and that means less money will go to communities and small businesses. The competitiveness and cohesion funding - all of the funding - is being adjusted in such a way that we, as 27 member states, will spend more on arms. The Government is not working to ensure that does not happen but, rather, to ensure it gets in on it and gets a slice of the pie. It is willing to leave behind our proud tradition of Irish neutrality and to hollow it out until there is nothing left of it. By way of the Defence (Amendment) Bill and all the other legislation it is trying to push through, the Government is, in effect, trying to get us to a point where Ireland might be compared with Switzerland, which is said to be neutral but has a massive arms industry.
We do not want that here. Neutrality for the Irish people means not just that we are militarily neutral but that we do not support military arms development. Our companies should be founded, and supported to be founded, in ways that are for good. Going back to my earlier point, even in the consultancy part of this, we are drawing our talent away from positive forces in Irish society and positive advancements in science and technology and towards war. This issue is so fundamental to us, but the Government is willing just to toss it out there because it wants a slice of the European money pie.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-09-30/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-10-05T01:00:59+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-09-30