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The sight of the Tánaiste being roundly heckled for ten minutes on NATO membership by Ireland’s ever-present but never-named far left will have warmed the cockles of many hearts across the nation, yesterday morning. Opposition to NATO membership, in Ireland, is not confined to the ranks of people before profit, or the occupant of the Presidential Mansion. It is a broad, and deeply felt position reflecting both thought-through pragmatism and an almost unthinking tribal identity as being culturally separate to the rest of the English-speaking world.
The pragmatic arguments are easy enough to understand: This country is simply not large enough to be of particular use to any global military alliance. We would not be a particularly strong link in the chain of NATO countries, and would likely be more of a vulnerability than an asset to the alliance. At the same time, our geographic position, in the very heart of NATO territory, makes us an unlikely target for NATO’s enemies: A Russian or Chinese invasion force would have to sail or fly through thousands of miles of hostile waters or airspace to even reach us.
The tribal arguments are also easy enough to understand: NATO is at its heart an Anglo-American organisation. Something like 80% of its firepower on land and sea comes from either the Pentagon, or His Majesty’s Armed Forces. The idea of Irish soldiers linking arms with the Welsh Guards to fight some under-equipped tribe in the mountains of Afghanistan is deeply offensive to many people’s sense of our history and identity, regardless of how real or imagined that vista actually is.
But the bigger problem for the Government, I think, is the consultative forum itself.
The consultative forum is, after all, the Government’s way of telling us all that it does not actually have a settled policy in relation to Ireland’s neutrality: If it did have a settled policy, it would not need to consult. And because it is consulting, it is allowing the worst fears of its opponents to become widely imagined.
Ireland does not have, on the table, any plans to change its present policy. If it did, those plans could be interrogated and debated and the consequences fully explained and examined. This is how politics is supposed to work: It is the Government’s job to govern, not to think out loud and cause uncertainty and division.
For example, it is vastly likely that the Government’s actual intent on neutrality is to preserve it in name, while integrating Irish forces in some way into the EU’s PESCO (Permanent structured co-operation) system, most likely on the grounds of interoperability and training.
That, were it on the table, would be a proposal that the public could properly debate and engage with: Would it drag us into wars, offensively or defensively? Would it make Ireland “a legitimate target”?
(An aside: if you take the war in Ukraine as an example, with the shelling of residential areas and the bombing of schools and hospitals and civilian dams, the idea of “legitimate targets” starts to seem quaint).
Or, on the other hand, would it provide us with valuable added defence capacity to defend our cyberspace, and sovereign waters and airspace? A serious proposal can be debated seriously. A consultative forum cannot be. All it does is allow people’s worst imagined scenario become the straw man that gets debated.
There is also an argument that the Government is being deeply cynical here: By allowing fears that the country might join NATO to percolate and be widely aired, there might well be the hope that some lesser modification to neutrality, such as the PESCO arrangement mooted above, might be seen as a reasonable compromise in its stead. It is fitting and to be expected that no sooner is a trap like that set than the ideologues on the far-left march straight into it with their “no blood for oil” signs at the ready.
But the reality is that the consultative forum itself is a bad joke: Ireland already has an elected consultative forum, the Oireachtas. That body has the ability to call and consult with as many witnesses and experts as it so desires to summon. Ultimately, any proposal that emerges from this forum will have to go through that process anyway. Once again, this feels like an effort – a la the citizens assemblies – to imbue something politicians wish to do anyway with the façade of expert and independent support.
My own views on neutrality, as previously outlined, are simple enough: The country has the choice either to remain neutral, and defend itself, or to join some common defence arrangement and enhance its defences that way. The present position, where we neither defend ourselves or have anyone else publicly committed to doing so, will remain just fine, until the day it isn’t, and it is too late to change it.
But those who believe in a change have a duty to put a proposal on the table and argue for it to the Irish public – and to accept the verdict of the Irish public, whatever that might be. This forum does not do that. It is a farce, and many people see right through it.
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