The question above, to me at least, is a genuinely interesting one. Regular readers will know that yours truly is something of a sceptic of Irish neutrality. But the fact is that we are neutral. It’s the national policy, one adopted by consensus over the years, and one which has never seriously been challenged or disputed at the ballot box. And yet here we are, considering whether to train soldiers for one side in a hot war:
UKRAINE HAS REQUESTED Irish troops to train its soldiers in removing Russian mines from battlefields, the Minister for Defence has revealed.
Simon Coveney, during Defence parliamentary questions in the Dáil last night, said that an official approach had been made.
In response to a question from Deputy Neale Richmond the Minister said that his Government wanted to do more to help the Ukrainian people but that the programme for Government did not permit them.
It is not known how the training would be delivered, whether Irish EOD experts would travel to Ukraine or if Ukrainian soldiers would come here to Ireland.
This isn’t a simple matter, at least not morally: On the one hand, land mines are some of the worst weapons devised by man. They linger in place long after wars have ended, waiting for the unsuspecting farmer – or worse, child – to step in the wrong place. They are not designed to kill, either. They’re designed to remove legs, on the theory that a squad of soldiers will not leave a colleague to bleed to death in the way they might leave one who had already died. Maim one, and you send the whole squad running for cover, carrying their wounded colleague. That’s the theory, and that’s how they work. They are horrible, cruel, monstrous weapons – abolishing and banning them, older readers might remember, was the lifetime cause of Diana, Princess of Wales, before her own untimely death.
Training soldiers on how to disarm them, then, is an unalloyed good thing to do. It is the difference between some child in four or five years being maimed, or not being maimed. Most reasonable people, one might hope, regardless of their views on the war, would support the removal and disarmament of land mines.
But there’s a problem.
The problem is that these mines are being put in place by the Russians not, primarily, to kill Ukrainian children in five or six years. That’s just a side-effect they don’t particularly care about.
No, the mines are being laid to stop Ukrainian soldiers advancing into areas where the Russians consider that their front line might be weak. Land mines, for all their evil, are not designed as an offensive weapon. They are a defensive measure: You lay them to stop the enemy from being able to advance on your position and attack you.
So, when we aid the Ukrainians in disarming Russian mines during the war itself, we are helping the Ukrainians advance on Russian positions, and undermining the Russian defences. That, I’m afraid, does not sound very neutral.
There’s another, very fair question here too: The Russians are not the only ones laying land mines. Here’s the Washington Post:
President Biden’s top military adviser, Gen. Mark A. Milley, told U.S. lawmakers last week that land mines “are important in order to shape enemy operations.” In testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Joint Chiefs chairman said, “We need to look no further than what’s happening actually in Ukraine, the land mines are being effectively used by the Ukrainian forces to shape the avenues of approach” by Russia.
So if Ireland is helping the Ukrainians disarm Russian landmines, on the grounds, presumably, that land mines are an objective evil, would and will Ireland provide similar training to Russian soldiers on how to do the same? That would be a genuinely neutral position.
I write this, by the way, as something close to a pro-Ukrainian absolutist. There is, in my view, no comparison between an invading army and a force defending its own country from invasion. But this, at the end of the day, is not an article about my views or about the morality of the war: It is an article about Irish neutrality, and what that means in practice. If it can be discarded to provide military assistance to one participant in a war, it’s not really neutrality at all, is it?
And, at the same time, I’m not sure how anybody can or could take the position that helping soldiers to defuse land mines is bad. Helping get these weapons out of the ground is obviously, objectively, and inarguably the right thing to do.
Which is one of the reasons I personally think our policy of neutrality is wrong.
But, if we are going to change that policy, we should do it officially. And with a debate. And with the consensus support of the public. Not with little sneak attacks on that policy like this one. The average Irish person might not notice it, but the Russians, certainly, will.