Alan O’Reilly is a political activist based in London.
For decades, a broad political consensus held around Ireland’s neutrality.
For nearly 100 years, Ireland has taken a proactively neutral stance on military issues. It is not a member of NATO, has repeatedly rejected calls to be part of any EU military integration, and has stayed clear of mutual defence treaties.
Irish soldiers do make a huge contribution across the globe. Ireland has a long and proud heritage serving in countless peacekeeping missions under the auspices of the United Nations: thousands of Irish soldiers have served proudly and honourably all over the world, and Ireland is the sixth-largest contributor of UN troops in the EU.
These peacekeeping missions are permitted under the framework called the triple lock. Under this system, all such deployments require a UN mandate (a Security Council resolution) along with approval by the Government and the Dáil (parliament). This ensures that Irish troops are always deployed under the cover of UN approval.
However, this consensus has become frayed over the last two decades – and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has raised fundamental questions for Irish politicians about Irish neutrality.
The first issue is a practical one, but nevertheless has profound implications: that the triple lock essentially gives one of the five permanent members of the Security Council – including Russia and China – an effective veto over the potential deployment of Irish troops abroad.
Since the Defence Forces do not serve under the auspices of other international organisations, this requirement for UN support is thus a serious limit of the scope of Irish foreign policy.
More broadly, the spectre of Russia, a large nation using its size and scale to overwhelm a smaller nation, has resonance in Ireland, and this has accelerated how Ireland’s political and security establishment is viewing foreign and defence policy.
In a Dáil debate in February 2022 Leo Varadkar, then Deputy Prime Minister, said that while Ireland might be militarily neutral, it was not politically neutral. Dublin has provided a significant amount of non-lethal defence equipment and other support to Ukraine, and also supported sanctions on the Russian government.
And despite being a small nation, Ireland herself has not escaped Russia’s notice.
Last year, just weeks before the outbreak of war in Ukraine, Russian warships entered the Irish Exclusive Economic Zone with the intention of conducting live-fire exercises; only after significant local and international protest did they withdraw. And in March 2020, six Russian aircraft were detected by NATO and European air forces off the west coast of Ireland.
Why are Russian forces interested in Ireland? Around three quarters of all transatlantic cables in the northern hemisphere pass through or near Irish waters. Defence analysts believe that there has been a concerted effort on Russia’s part to map these cables – and a successful attack on them could be very damaging.
Yet Irish defence spending has not matched this changing world: the Republic had the lowest defence spending of any EU member in 2021 at just 0.2 per cent of GDP, compared to a bloc-wide average of 1.3 per cent.
Only two weeks ago Micheál Martin, the Foreign Minister, announced that the government will ask the public for their views on the country’s tradition of military neutrality in a consultative forum. Announcing the forum, he said:
“We have seen blatant and brutal disregard by Russia of international law and Europe’s collective security architecture… and our traditional policy of military neutrality does not inure us from the need to respond to this new reality”.
The forum, which will be held in June, will focus on a range of security issues and allow for a discussion on the decades-old neutrality policy.
The government has been clear to say there is no pre-conceived outcome to these deliberations, and it may well be the case that Ireland takes no further action. Changes in the policy are not popular.
A 2022 Irish Times/Ipsos poll found two-thirds of voters do not want to see any change in neutrality, with less than a quarter in favour of a new stance. There remains too strong political opposition to any change in policy, particularly from left wing parties.
Nevertheless, it is clear from the comments of senior political leaders that they recognise that there are new military and foreign policy realities, and that Ireland may need to begin to adjust its policies accordingly. Getting the voters’ consent is another matter.