Ancient Greek wisdom dictates that “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.” It should surprise precisely nobody, then, that in a society like Ireland’s, old men call for wars in whose battles they shall never have to fight.
The Ukrainian crisis has highlighted this starkly, and Irish warhawks—a phrase I genuinely shake my head while typing—have not been found wanting. At a time when our TVs and phone screens are melting down with near-realtime images of the death and destruction being wrought by 21st century missiles, tanks and rocket-launchers on a European urban setting, there are those among us who seem to want a taste, and who have placed Ireland’s military neutrality firmly in their crosshairs as a result.
Neutrality is an oxymoronically controversial concept. Ignoring for a moment the fact that if everyone was militarily neutral, nobody would need to be, it has kept Irish soldiers in dangerous but inoffensive peacekeeping roles and out of the way of much of the harm their international contemporaries have faced for as long as Ireland has had an army. There are untold mothers, partners, and children the length and breadth of Ireland who are grateful for the wont of tragedy that this has ensured, even if they don’t know it.
So it is surprising that the Carthaginian destruction of the people and city of Mariupol seems to have piqued the interest of some of our bien pensants, like magpies spotting a penny in a fountain and lining up to take a dive.
It starts at the top, and Taoiseach Míchéal Martin has gone on record saying that Irish neutrality needs to “evolve”. At his party’s 1916 ceremony at Arbour Hill, the man touted by some as Fianna Fáil’s next candidate for the Áras invited the country to participate in “A proper, informed and inclusive debate about our future policies,” in relation to our neutrality while MEP Barry Andrews has made the predictable call for a Citizens’ Assembly. Anybody who has voted No to anything in the last 10 years will recognise this language as a chilling, bacio-della-morte threat to the status quo; a threat a party on c. 17% could never make without significant political support.
Enter his loyal deputy, Tánaiste Leo Varadkar with years of experience of sapping at neutrality’s foundations and 50 head of Blueshirt yes-men waiting to vote as bid. Where the Taoiseach had the good grace to at least wait for a bonafide war before agitating for militarization in Ireland, though, subordinate Varadkar has only needed a peacetime Christmas Eve. On 24 December 2017, he took the opportunity of a visit to Irish peacekeepers in Lebanon to offer a classic piece of Varadkar waffle. We were told that neutrality was a positive for Ireland, but one we might need to change because of people smugglers; that it was unique feature of Irish foreign policy that gave us particular peacekeeping talents, but also a World War II relic that ought to be retired so we can “manage mass migration”; and—by way of hilarious tangent for some reason—that once and future US President Trump moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was the “wrong long-term decision.”
While Israelis, Emiratis, Bahrainis and other beneficiaries of the Abraham Accords vociferously disagree on the Middle-Eastern point, it is up to the rest of us to determine why people smugglers and “mass migration” require Ireland to choose sides in extremely foreign wars when other countries just do deals with Rwanda. Varadkar nevertheless and unfortunately represents the majority feeling in Fine Gael, with his anti-neutrality efforts amply supported by figures like Deputy Neale “Iron Sides” Richmond, Senator Martin “Mad Dog” Conway, and others.
Media support is also abundant but not universal. Veteran columnist Frank Coughlan wrote a piece for the Irish Independent this week featuring former minister Alan Shatter and a call for the Irish neutrality of today to be treated with the same malignance as we treat Irish neutrality from 1939 to 1945. Evoking the unmatched horror of the Holocaust and describing those in favour of neutrality as parochial, insular, and “serially oppressed”(!), Coughlan effectively draws a crude moral lineation from modern Irish neutrality and its proponents to the gates of Auschwitz.
Proper, informed, and inclusive indeed. Columnist David Quinn has also asked whether Ireland can “afford to remain aloof” and the Irish Examiner appears to have tacitly adopted an anti-neutrality position with a recent editorial proposing that our military will need beefing up before we can contemplate playing a meaningful role and we should not imagine that there will be significant unanimity behind any decision to do so.
By contrast, Hell has frozen over and Fintan O’Toole has spoken sense, using a recent column to extol the virtues of the other forms of support that Ireland can offer to allies in need in the form of, for example, clean energy. I’m not sure what I think of the notion that Ireland could be some kind of global generator given Minister for Energy Eamon Ryan’s ongoing crackdown on warmth and the causes of warmth, but half a loaf of realism is better than none.
Realism brings us to the root of the whole issue: None of the people agitating the loudest for the deployment of Irish boots abroad will have to fill those boots. In fact, many of them are so old that their kids won’t have fill them either. “Their Country Needs You” they say, desperately emulating their parents and grandparents’ generations by committing their grandkids to unknown wars thousands of miles away, prompted by a terrible war that is unjust and should not be happening, but that Ireland has no existential interest in.
In discussions like these, it is very easy to degenerate into an anti-NATO rant, as if NATO is somehow a bad thing in the world. NATO is of course a good thing, and none of us want to live in a world dominated by nuclear Russia and nuclear China, aided and abetted by Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and a whole rogues gallery of others. Unfortunately, though, Ireland’s hawks often focus their ambitions on making Ireland accede to that military alliance, whose membership brings us within a hair’s breadth of nuclear weapons 60 times more powerful than those used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and imposes a host of legally-binding obligations that would have committed us to more than a few recent wars.
But what if they’d had their way in 2001, for example? Would generations of Irish soldiers and their children have spent 21 years bleeding and dying in Kandahar only to be chased out last August, like the New Zealanders? In 2003, would Irish soldiers have been blown-up or worse looking for weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist in Baghdad, like the Belgians?
Going a step further, would we back home have suffered the sorts of bombings, shootings, and other massive terrorist attacks that countries that participated in these operations did? Would we have had our own version of the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, or the Bataclan Theatre in Paris, or the Lindt Café in Sydney, or the side of the road in Nice? We should thank God that these are only rhetorical questions: hypothetical situations that Ireland has not had to confront with more than flags, hashtags and international solidarity, instead of the military reality that so many of our not-neutral neighbours have had to recover from over and over, blade after bullet after bomb.
Our neutrality isn’t perfect—nothing is—and the notion that we must ask the UN, including its many bad actors, for permission before rattling off the few bullets that we have is ludicrous. As a comparatively rich country, Ireland also has a responsibility to do our best for people around the world who cannot help themselves, especially when they find themselves at the business end of a powerful neighbour’s tank barrel. Our humanitarian record of generosity is unmatched in this regard, but in order to do this, our politicians cannot directly or indirectly expose the rest of us to mortal danger in the name of today’s thing.
Notwithstanding the mass of charged, emotional language running it down, the most recent polls indicate that 2/3s of voters still support neutrality, so if for whatever reason keeping our lads out of other people’s wars doesn’t strike Irish decision makers as the moral choice to make, it might hopefully strike them as the political one.
Killian Foley-Walsh