Participation in European army will not serve Irish nation well

Some of the arguments put in your editorial (March 9) advocating an EU army echo those of the era of European colonizations of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Giving guns to the European Union is no different to providing armed forces to EU’s predecessors such as the various East India Companies, or Cecil Rhodes. And there is very little difference between the Irish General Pat Nash commanding a French/Irish force sent to Chad in 2008, and the Irish General Thomas Lally at the head of the French/Irish brigade sent to Ponticherry in India to protect French commercial interests there in 1757.

These days we hear the same age-old imperial arguments being put by bureaucrats who have put their patriotism aside for the comfort of their plush Pullman seats on the EU gravy train. They are the ones who have consistently denied financial sanction for essential national defensive measures, but have had no problem paying tens of millions of euro for consultants and wasteful technologies to advance their own administrative systems.These are the same people who advocated reliance on the EU to relieve us from our financial crisis, and whose advise has

enslaved our nation for generations to come.

Finance Minister Michael Noonan has admitted that we have suffered our greatest national disaster since the famine in the 1840’s. Well it was back then, and not during the Emergency, that the Young Irelanders developed our only successful national defence policy which the people copperfastened in the Constitution two years before the outbreak of World War II. Thomas Davis had argued that if a people does not possess the power to defend or advance it’s liberties, then they are inherently slaves and that was how he saw the Irish nation being treated in his time.

But it not only English masters that were referred to. Fellow Young Irelander William Smith O’Brien expressed similar sentiments in the House Of Commons on his way back from visiting the new revolutionary Government in Paris in 1848:

“Irish freedom must be won by Irish courage and by Irish firmness. I have no desire to impose upon my country one description of servitude in the place of another; for I believe that the liberty of Ireland and its redemption from its present position, were they won by foreign bayonets, could not be retained in its possession by foreign bayonets; and, therefore, it is not my desire or my intention to place my country under foreign dominion.”

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Michael Heery

North King St

Dublin 7