Irish ‘neutrality’ has always been a ruse as we operate globally

Any material that helps the war effort means you take sides and we took sides.

The reason we are having this debate in the first place is because the Greens have insisted that a clause be included in the government program that state funds will not be used to purchase offensive weapons.

The irony is that Ukraine is running out of time and even too late to send critical non-lethal items to where they are needed.

So now we really need to take this confusion and confusion about this “neutrality” story and face it head on and determine what we want.

We are currently the only country in the world to use the term ‘militarily neutral’.

It’s like saying we’re “a little bit pregnant.”

It doesn’t mean anything except that we think we’re morally superior because we’re helping somehow but staying on the sidelines.

The biggest problem is that neutrality means completely different things to different people.

We really should stop using the word as we misuse its meaning terribly.

For the state, “neutrality” means that we are not members of a specifically military alliance that includes a mutual defense clause, ie. NATO, which has the well-publicized Article 5, which obliges all members to come to the aid of others when attacked and to guarantee the borders of all NATO members.

The post-WWII coalition government was urged by the United States to join, but balked at the idea of ​​an alliance that would get us to recognize the border with Britain on that island.

Then-Tánaiste Seán MacBride offered the US a bilateral defense pact, but they hesitated for fear of angering Britain.

My point here is that contrary to many opinions, Irish ‘neutrality’ was never the hallowed holy totem that some people think it is.

It was simply a pragmatic policy aimed at getting us through WWII unscathed.

Even then, it was mostly a trick
this allowed us to work significantly with the Allies while presenting a “neutral” facade.

Constant references to its place in the Constitution relate to Article 29, which simply says that without a referendum we will not sign any mutual defense pacts requested by the European Council.

It’s quite specific and therefore quite limited.

But the reality is that our “neutrality” is really about independence of action, not passivity cloaked in ignorance.

If we stopped using the word ‘neutral’ and put in the word ‘independent’ we would get closer to the truth of where we stand and where perhaps the majority of Irish people would like us to be.

The irony, however, is that in order to pass the 2007 Lisbon Treaty, we created the triple lock mechanism to protect our “military neutrality”.

All of this has meant that other states, such as Russia and China, which sit on the UN Security Council, have a veto on when and where Irish troops can be stationed.

It also means that if there is a UN resolution, we can technically deploy troops on a war base once the Dáil agrees to it. To be truly neutral, not Irish ‘neutral’, we would have to be aloof and not meddle in the world and never take sides.

In many ways, the debate is superfluous because we have become dependent on one another to advance socially and economically as a nation. This interdependence meant we could never be truly neutral.

But we must not get bogged down in backward-looking debates.

We should learn from our other partner countries. The Finns and Swedes were once traditional “neutrals”.

I have worked closely with their forces over many years and can follow progress to where they now classify themselves as ‘unaligned’.

This means that they are not part of a mutual defense pact like NATO, but they coordinate and cooperate with them on a regular basis.

Now we need to recognize that the world has changed, and we need to recognize that what we need for Ireland is a whole-of-society approach to defense and security – one that allows for more imaginative forms of coordination and collaboration with all our partners and neighbors, and that gives us the flexibility to respond to fluctuating and emerging threats.

And once and for all, let’s stop obsessing over words and focus more on actions and move on to help save the lives of those in distress.

Declan Power is an independent security and defense analyst