100% agreed with this article. The whole idea of Ireland's supposed neutrality is a farce. Does anyone really think that if a country like Russia decided to full-on invade Ireland, other European nations would just shrug it off? Of course not, and the Irish are well aware of that and rely on it (already they explicitly rely on the UK to help defend their country as a matter of policy).
So really it's a simple hypocrisy, a one-way street. You help us, but we don't help you. We're too principled to help others, you see.
There's also a long history of tragic events happening precisely because everyone was preparing for them (see: WWI) and of course, of horribly wrong choices getting prepared for things that never happened.
WW1 wasn’t “started by preparation”. In fact it was the continuation of about 100 years of war, and the war continued for nearly 100 years afterward. Europe had been at war nearly continuously from Napoleon to 2000 .
The partition of Europe between the two victors of WW2 (USA and USSR) was part of the peace, not a state of war. The cold war wasn't a war inside Europe but between two rival superpowers; the Yugoslavia war wasn't one between EU countries but a civil war result of a change in external conditions.
And Stalin continued to take territory even later, moving into East Germany, Czechoslovakia, etc . Continuing with military pressure over the later years.
... and an equally long history of people "avoiding war", while refusing to be reasonable, right up to the point that a gigantic war becomes unavoidable. People will choose to go to war over a prolonged economic crisis. Such a crisis can easily be avoided by countries working together rather than push costs onto each other, but in any actual crisis they never do cooperate.
And of course, WWII would be an example of that. It was also far worse than WWI, including for Ireland. So there's even a very strong case that this is a self-destructive attitude for Ireland.
But if history teaches us anything, whether the example of the Weimar republic or anything else, it's that you can tell people this all you want. You can show how bad things are and how the situation cannot continue, people will NEVER accept what needs to be done, if it has to be done by them.
For example, right now it's pretty damn obvious European shared military presence in the East Sea and in Eastern European countries is a very desirable thing indeed. Every other EU country, and several others like Switzerland, have committed to put forward about 5% of GDP towards this (>10% of their total government budget) ... so it would seem only fair Ireland joins them, after all, without that presence Ireland's economy cannot keep working, because it cannot export or import freely. Ireland is letting other people pay for its safety, giving nothing in return, but Ireland is competing with them for the rewards of that safety. And your very comment shows that you're arguing to not do it, illustrating the problem. Of course, profiting economically of other countries while abandoning them militarily is exactly why Russia (and even China) think they can just conquer them. If that happens, it would be a total disaster for Ireland. But nobody cares.
And of course, Ireland is not currently in an economic crisis, quite the opposite, and could easily cooperate ... but doesn't. We can only imagine what will happen when inevitably, a crisis does come.
In fact Ireland currently has tax laws that let it essentially tax all of Europe (letting the FANG companies take profits out of Europe tax-free in return for jobs in Ireland, that are then heavily taxed by the Irish government. The employees of those companies are heavily taxed, btw, NOT the companies themselves). That's what the current Irish government actually prides itself on. Stealing tax revenue from it's main allies. Seriously.
So just so we're clear: Ireland is destroying corporate tax income in 30 EU countries, in trade for jobs, not filled by Irish people, in Dublin, so those can be taxed at >50%. This is, by the way, what the Irish government prides itself on, and it is why living in Dublin has basically become impossibly expensive.
It is also forcing the EU tax system to become 10x more complicated than it already is (the EU is working to have multinationals pay taxes in the countries where they make money, so any advantage of having a tax domicile in a specific country disappears. But of course, this will be complicated, to put it mildly)
Except the Irish army has conducted large numbers of peacekeeping missions as part of the United Nations. Irish soldiers have died in said operations. The Siege at Jadotville is one example - there is a pretty great film about this.
That's laudable, but it doesn't change the fact that they rely on their European neighbors to defend them while feigning "neutrality" and wouldn't return the favor if another, say, EU country were seriously attacked.
Like preventing the Hezbollah attack on Israel for example. And yes, an Irish soldier died. Pte Rooney.
I hope the other missions went better ...
Btw: Lebanon convicted someone to a death sentence over this killing. He wasn't in court however and the conviction remains without any actual consequence for the killer, he hasn't ever been arrested. The Irish government had no reaction, other than hiding that this happened, and that nobody was actually punished is not well known in Ireland.
If Russia decided to full-on invade Ireland, a country of 4.5 million (as completely absurd as this idea is, being Ireland where it is) having its own military would not help Ireland- it should better capitulate quickly to limit damage.
If Taiwan weren't defended by the US (for purely strategic interests, certainly not because of idealism or democracy) then yes, sure. Better than a destructive war with the same identical outcome.
Btw, do you also happen to think that Ireland should arm itself against a possible invasion from the US?
What? The very distance involved and difficulty of such an invasion is precisely why resistance is extremely plausible and not being able to do so is indefensible. Even a "token" amount of resistance makes it exponentially more difficult.
You would certainly have been the type of person whining about how Ukraine was doomed to fall in a matter of hours under the incredible size and capability of the Russian military. Like, these guys are just not that competent. You can make the job nearly impossible for them by just giving a single solitary fuck.
To say nothing of the fact that "full invasion" isn't even really the target. They just need to be able to defend their own airspace and sea lanes against errant Russian planes and ships.
> The very distance involved and difficulty of such an invasion is precisely why resistance is extremely plausible
Not to mention the possibility of an invasion from Australia. They should prepare against that, too! See, the whole premise of this discussion is completely absurd: there is no threat whatsoever by Russia to Ireland. There's a narrative that gets pushed more every day that Europe is under threat from Russia and should gear up for a war, and even (say some) attack first. Notice that all the drones spotted above airports and military installations are only alleged to belong to Russia, but not a single one has been reasonably attributed to them. And the party that has most to gain from an increase in the tension between Europe and Russia is Ukraine, not Russia.
> You would certainly have been the type of person whining about how Ukraine was doomed to fall
And I was right, as it seems, hundreds of thousands of deaths later, cities razed to the ground, a country in ruins. Those who didn't want peace talks share in part the responsibility of those deaths, do you ever think about it?
A closely surveilled Russian vessel that was briefly seen several kms away from undersea cables. Meanwhile, the only confirmed hostile act against European infrastructure was the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, and the perpetrators were our "allies", Ukraine and the US.
We don't know who the perpetrators were. There's speculation that it was carried out by Russia itself.
Your blaming it on Ukraine and US without proof, much like your suggestions that Ukraine should surrender to stop the war, is suspcious.
Face facts, Russia could stop the war anytime they like because they started it. Where as for Ukraine surrending doesn't stop the mass killings or the kidnapping of their children.
We know that because in areas that have been conquered by Russia these things have continued.
It would be time that people take responsibility again for their own (and their countries') choices instead of blaming everything wrong on the mythical bogeyman Russia.
Ireland having 0 military capabilities, and being completely dependent on NATO, while being extremely opinionated, on how and what NATO does, always irked me deeply.
Ireland doesn't have exactly zero military capabilities. For example they have a military base in Lebanon. They have a decades long solidarity with Hezbollah and solidarity demonstrations are commonplace
No offense but how is that not obvious by second grade. Don't have a big mouth if you don't have a big stick too. Ireland doesn't have quiet opinions, but a rather big mouth about other nations' foreign policy.
"Armed debate" is a misread. The point of my comment was that there is little sympathy for people that bite the hand that feeds them or talk themselves into situations they don't have the wherewithal to navigate.
Not that I'm recommending it but Putin's regime seems to behave much like the mafia and will get along with people who pay it protection money or ally with it.
Can you point me to some examples? I have not followed closely but it seems that Ireland is on the same page as the other EU states in regards to supporting Ukraine.
I'm also curious about what you consider a "very extreme opinion" to be in this regard.
Here is a specific example where an Irish MEP specifically speaks against sanctions on Russia and against NATO donating any weapons to Ukraine in front of the EU parliament.
They are two MPs, they can say whatever they want. Sadly they don't reflect the position of Ireland, and I hope you are not trying to say that Ireland or Europe should abolish their internal democracy.
I say "sadly" because they're perfectly right. Daly: "the more arms you pump into Ukraine, the more the war will be prolonged, and the more Ukrainians will die [...] We will sit down with Russia, there will be a negotiated peace and this organisation should promote it earlier".
She said this three years ago: in the meanwhile hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians have died, Ukraine has lost its territory anyway, we are sitting down with Russia and there is going to be a negotiated peace, and Europe is not part of it because it was never able to promote any diplomacy. Time proved her right on all points.
Ireland doesn't have 0 military capabilities, they have enough of a military to conduct peacekeeping missions elsewhere, which they don't need to do. They just don't have the ability to defend an invasion, but they do certainly have a military that does good in the world.
Who said without others? You don't need tanks for peacekeeping missions. Or jets for that matter.
FWIW I was in Kosovo and served in a multionational task force including the Irish.
they were based next to some chicken farm, lord knows why, you could smell them from miles away, if you were unlucky.
Their "peacekeeping" missions are somewhere between utterly impotent / useless and actively counterproductive. Playing dumb and doing nothing while Hezbollah uses you as cover to launch missiles over the border from a couple hundred meters away is not keeping the peace.
That assumes that their mission is to stop anything. UNRWA's sole mission (like most large-scale nonprofits - not suggesting they're unique) is to continue to procure money for its 30,000 or so salaried posts.
Additionally, it assumes that the Irish, who broadly as a people support national liberation movements, would even want to prevent Hezbollah from rebuilding, even if they could.
Notably thousands of Irish soldiers did fight the Germans in WW2 but via joining the British Army... an act that was frowned upon at the times. Many were killed.
I had heard of the blacklist, but thought that it was for those who deserted the Irish military to join the British. Punishing deserters is understandable, no matter the motive.
That said, if I understand the article correctly, those who did this were punished worse than deserters who did not go fight?!?
A lot of governments took the side of the Nazis. Including the EU's founder, Robert Schuman, ex-Nazi collaborator of the French Vichy government. But that is nothing compared to many others.
Things get so much worse. The Dutch Child protection agency has in it's historical archives, not just that they collaborated with implementing the holocaust against children, but actually organized it. Jewish (and various other groups, like Romani) children were "invited" to summer camps, that turned out to be death camps (and the "east front", which you also didn't return from). They even set a trap to deport Jewish and mentally and physically disabled children to extermination camps, including a number of their own personnel, and even went so far as to hunt their own personnel that "chose the side of the children".
Austrian child protection agency selected children to be sent to death camps. That, Austrian psychiatry before and during the holocaust, is where Autism comes from. The first children diagnosed with Autism were not just sent to death camps, that was the only purpose of the diagnosis of Autism. To mark the child for death to "protect (something about race that I will not repeat)".
In case you ever wonder why the child protection agencies of those countries still reserve the right to lie about the death of children, even today, that is why. Because both mass-murdered children out of racism, and if a concrete case, of which there are many, were to come to court even today ...
And yet, it gets worse. And extremely confusing. Many things boil down to what everybody actually kind of knows. Ideas, especially implemented on the scale of a state, come from a long history and trials. Everything around WW2 was, justly and correctly, blamed on the Nazis. Nazis did those things. But they got the idea, and in many cases personnel, from somewhere. And a LOT of groups have used that to absolve themselves of what they did before, often long before, WW2. Look up "industrial psychiatry" sometime.
Well, one can look at this as at least a step in the right direction, compared to the active collaboration with Germany during WW1 by the people who became Irish government by the time of WW2 arrived.
The two world wars were not the same. WW1 was a stupid war that happened for stupid reasons, and there were no real moral differences between the sides. Many nations tried to use the war as an opportunity for independence by collaborating with the opposing side. Some of them were successful.
In Finland, we still call infantry Jägers in honor of those who went to Germany to receive military training and to fight against Russia.
> Ireland chose to take a position against colonialism
By refusing to fight the Nazis? What?
Are you implying that the Allies were the colonizers in WW2? (The
Allied countries were also colonizers obviously, but within WW2 it's pretty obvious which countries were doing more of that, and more aggressively)
What was a tiny, broke, agrarian country just out of a civil war that was still simmering going to do about the Nazis?
They had a well-justified disdain for being pulled into the British orbit. They chose neutrality.
Do you hold Switzerland and Sweden to the same standard?
If Britain were to join in a conflict with Russia over Ukraine, would you expect Indian soldiers to rally to the cause of their former King and Country?
If you’re an American, would you be in favor of providing VA benefits to US Army soldiers who deserted and joined the Ukrainian army?
Dunno about deserting to join the Ukrainian army but they seem ok with leaving the US military and joining the Ukrainian army. See Malcolm Nance for example.
Ireland's position at the time (before they got images of concentration and elimination camps) was that what the Nazi did was no different than what colonial powers did during 200 years.
And since the Nazis invented the concentration camps in Mozambique and Namibie (taking example from Belgium) around 1909, i'd say they weren't that wrong.
The Germans in Africa were cruel and inhumane. But the concentration camp and modern military campaigns targeting civilian populations were not something alien to the British.
Ireland is usually underplayed and less clearly linked to government policy as much of the dirty work was done by private entities. You’re not likely familiar with Cromwell’s invasion, the Ulster Plantation or the famine… but the Irish were. Cromwell’s actions and later events resulted in the death of 10+% of the population. The famine resulted in the death of 10% and emigration of 10% of the population. That’s a lot of dead Irish and deeply affected these leaders.
I’m not defending Nazis or on some insane rant about Britain. I just think you need to judge decisions in context of the times.
But many of the nazis in power in 36 did their first experimentations in the colonies. And by the way, in 33, one of the first act of Nazi germany was the sterilization of black and multiracial children.
You know, there’s something to be said for Ireland’s attitude. The other islands (ha!) and the continent have treated them as second-class chattel for centuries, while competing amongst themselves for global hegemony. Better to stay out of that game and sort their own business, many of them think.
I assume you're referring to the 1952 agreement that the RAF is allowed to intercept unidentified or hostile aircraft in Irish airspace?
That's because the UK does not want Ireland to have an army. Ireland has a long history of standing with Native Americans, Palestinians, and other groups facing colonization. They even have a military base in Lebanon and a very long standing partnership with Hezbollah (Hezbollah was born out of the struggle to take back the bottom third of their country that was occupied by the US and Israel so they are often seen as an anti-colonial movement).
Ireland having any sort of military capacities would directly contradict UK military interests.
Contradicted by the fact that the Irish military forces were entirely equipped with UK-supplied aircraft and vehicles until the 1960s, at which point Ireland turned towards France instead.
The UK never intervened to prevent Ireland acquiring any weapon system, in contrast it was Irish budget frugality that consistently undermined the military.
At present Ireland is considering the purchase of Gripen interceptors, and the UK seems at worst indifferent and probably actually quite relieved.
The Russians are making incursions into Irish waters and airspace, it's just a brute fact. So either they play the game, or Britain plays it for them. They don't get to sit aloof above it all, that's not how reality works.
They are a protectorate in all but name, it's disgraceful.
Canada is in a similar situation. A lot of high-minded talk about peacekeeping and neutrality, but constantly benefitting from being implicitly protected by US defence policy. The real test will come if/when Russia decides to challenge Canadian arctic sovereignty.
The article addresses this unfortunate attitude: the whole premise of your question is, "well they'd have to go through these other countries first, so not our problem".
It's a bit like if Kansas refused to pay anything towards the defense budget because any hostile powers would have to go through all those other states first.
But, as the article also notes, air and sea power are things. If a hostile power decides to fuck with one of the many undersea Internet cables that make their way to and through Ireland, what's Ireland going to do about it?
> It's a bit like if Kansas refused to pay anything towards the defense budget because any hostile powers would have to go through all those other states first
The Russians have actively sabotaged undersea cables belonging or connecting to NATO countries. What have they done about it?
In general, states like Kansas are dependent on Federal money anyway, so they they don’t really contribute much. 10 states basically support the Federal government from a tax perspective.
Kansas would probably spend very little on defense, if it was a sovereign state.
Defense spending is not virtue signaling. It's money countries may have to waste if they feel threatened. But if there are no credible threats, it's better to lower the taxes or to spend the money on something that actually benefits the citizens.
Inability through choice, it should be clarified, given the title the poster or mods decided upon. Perhaps "unwillingness" is more accurate - they are a rich country after all, what with all that GDP
I think Ireland's commitment to pacifism and neutrality is laudable. Too few people live here to be able to defend against attacks from a larger power, and Ireland's strong suit has always been diplomacy, anyway. That obviously annoys people who either (for some unfathomable reason) like war or stand to gain personally from increased defence spending. Fortunately, there is little appetite for the kind of militarisation that the author of this article is hoping for. I'll add, too, that societies organised around the sort of violence, hostility, aggression, and cynicism that go hand in hand with powerful militaries don't seem to be very nice places to live.
There are legitimate practical issues with Ireland not being capable of policing its airspace or marine borders that don't go away just because Ireland is good at diplomacy (an assertion which I question in the first place).
This assumes that all nation and political actors will be happy to engage in democracy, which isn't the case. Not every country is a rational liberal democracy (and even those are having a rough time).
It's not even about that really. Enemy aircraft in Irish airspace is against British interests. For that matter, Ireland having any sort of military capabilities is probably against British interests. The situation is everything the UK could hope for. I doubt the UK would allow it to change
So really it's a simple hypocrisy, a one-way street. You help us, but we don't help you. We're too principled to help others, you see.
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