Irish politicians and human rights activists are voicing growing concern at the US military's use of Shannon airport after it emerged that an average of 900 soldiers a day passed through the commercial west coast airport last year.
Groups of American soldiers in desert fatigues sipping Coca-Cola in the departure lounge or browsing the duty-free shop on their way to and from Iraq are now a familiar sight at Ireland's second-biggest airport. Government figures show that around 330,000 troops, more than double that of 2004, passed through the airport last year as military planes stopped and refuelled.
Peace campaigners say most soldiers being transported between the US and Iraq now pass through Ireland, making it the favoured European stopover and calling into question Ireland's neutral status.
Until recently, many councillors on Ireland's west coast stressed the economic benefit of the stopovers, which generated an estimated €37m (£25m) for the airport last year.
The former Labour mayor of Shannon, Gregg Duff, said those opposed to the presence of GIs had been accused of not caring about local jobs and endangering the US investment which fuelled much of the Celtic Tiger economic boom. In one local radio debate, a Fianna Fáil party activist warned that US businesses would pull out of the west of Ireland if locals were seen as hostile to troops.
But amid new concerns that Shannon may have hosted CIA "rendition" flights carrying prisoners to countries where they could be tortured, local politicians have changed their tone. Town councillors, warning that the region's reputation is being damaged, have unanimously approved a motion calling on the government to inspect US planes at the airport. Clare county council has seen wide support for a motion demanding that the Irish army inspect every CIA-chartered flight.
Fine Gael's Martin Conway, who raised the motion at Clare county council, warned that Shannon's international standing was at risk. "I would prefer to see US troops not use Shannon at all," he said.
Brian Meaney, of the Green party, said: "You can't allow an airport's future to depend on selling sandwiches to soldiers. People have a notion of Irish neutrality, and they think it is being undermined and sold out."
The Irish Human Rights Commission and the Council of Europe have called on the government to seek US agreement that every plane suspected of transporting prisoners will be inspected.
A spokesman from Dublin's department of foreign affairs said the government strongly condemned torture and had received "explicit, unambiguous and unqualified" assurances from the US that no prisoners had been transported through Irish airports.
Six CIA-chartered planes have landed at Shannon 43 times over the past four years, according to the government. But Amnesty International believes the CIA landed 50 times at Shannon between September 2001 and 2005.
Last month, peace activist Cindy Sheehan visited Dublin demanding that the Irish government inspect CIA flights. She said her son stopped at Shannon on his way to Iraq and described the airport in his last unposted letter. The US academic Noam Chomsky this week told a Dublin audience that if Shannon was being used by the CIA to transport prisoners, Ireland would be participating in a war crime as defined by the Nuremberg tribunal. Such was the demand to hear him speak that 4,000 people were turned away.
Edward Horgan, a former Irish soldier who served with UN peacekeeping missions for 22 years before leading a campaign against US military use of Shannon, said up to 100 peace activists had been prosecuted in Ireland since 2002.
After two retrials, Mary Kelly, an Irish nurse, was found guilty of criminal damage for taking an axe to a plane at Shannon. She plans to appeal. Five protesters accused of damaging another US plane at Shannon are awaiting their third trial after the second collapsed when defence lawyers suggested that the judge had been invited to both George Bush's presidential inaugurations and attended the first one in 2000.