Wallace isn’t responsible for risk from Shannon
Apart from flip-flopping on the issue, there’s another double standard here.
When the Irish government first offered the use of Shannon to the US military, did they think of the potential risk of putting troops and military cargo (which potentially could include explosives) on the tarmac not far from civilian flights in an airport that doesn’t have adequate security nor safety measure for military operations?
It should be pointed out that common routes for US troops and cargo to the Middle East includes Shannon civilian airport, and then military bases in Germany, Italy or Romania. Sometimes they overfly Ireland and land at RAF bases in the UK.
You can find articles from 2002, long before Mick Wallace was in politics, bragging about the welcome the Ireland is giving US troops.
You can see photos of the troops in uniform, and as well as the names of the hotels they stayed in. The government didn’t accuse the embedded reporters with the US military of endangering Shannon, did they? And yet these reports appeared in dozens of newspapers outside Ireland.
More than a decade ago, Curtis Doebbler, an international human rights lawyer who was then teaching in Al Najah University visited Ireland and told us that people in the Middle East were aware of the US military using Shannon.
More recently, Tom Clonan, journalist and former captain in the Irish Defence Forces said that groups such as Hezbollah had long been aware of the Irish government allowing Shannon to be used by the US military.
It is typical of politicians to try to shift the blame onto their critics.
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