The push to undermine Ireland’s neutrality faces public opposition

Despite growing calls for militarisation, polls show strong public support for Ireland’s neutrality as government pressure intensifies

Damaged buildings following a Russian strike on Lviv, Ukraine. “Attempts to chip away Ireland’s neutrality follow a familiar script: the geopolitical calculus in Europe has been altered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and as a result European states need to massively expand security spending and adopt a ‘war footing’.” Picture: Yuriy Dyachyshyn/AFP via Getty

If you read the headlines in any major Irish newspaper or tune in to the national broadcaster these days, you might think that there is widespread popular consensus that Ireland’s longstanding policy of military neutrality should be scrapped.

However, the opposite is the case. The latest Ireland Thinks poll, released earlier this month, suggests that an overwhelming majority of the Irish public (75%) supports Ireland maintaining neutrality.

The conclusion is clear: the people of Ireland are not in favour of increased militarisation or becoming party to international conflicts.

Far from representing the democratic will of the Irish people, the prevailing commentary from Government parties, ministerial reports, arms industry lobbyists, think tanks, and conservative academics betrays a profoundly anti-democratic sentiment: that the Irish people don’t understand their own commitment to neutrality and that foreign policy debates are best left to the big boys. They are all insistent that Ireland must ‘adapt to the new normal’ of increasing militarism, and that failing to do so would not only be dangerous but demonstrate an embarrassing political immaturity.

These attempts to chip away Ireland’s neutrality follow a familiar script: the geopolitical calculus in Europe has been fundamentally altered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and as a result European states need to massively expand security spending and adopt a ‘war footing’. 

Under these new geopolitical conditions, we are told, Ireland can no longer expect neutrality to guarantee security or represent a morally defensible position in world affairs.

Last week, The Ditch reported that a ‘secret’ meeting recently took place between the Department of Defence and the Irish Defence and Security Association (IDSA), an arms lobby group founded in 2021, to discuss Ireland’s defence policy. State bodies, including IDA Ireland, Enterprise Ireland, and the departments of Enterprise and Foreign Affairs, were also invited, indicating that defence interests are now included in the State’s efforts to support FDI, particularly US investment, as a backbone of Ireland’s economy.

The same day it was reported that officials in the Department of Defence had prepared a heavily redacted brief for incoming Defence Minister Simon Harris, warning that ‘tolerance’ of Ireland’s neutrality may be waning, with formerly neutral states Finland and Sweden having joined Nato. Department officials noted that this could result in Irish companies missing out on defence contracts and Irish universities losing access to research funding awarded through the European Defence Fund. The language of economic ‘consequences’ mirrors the veiled threats made against Ireland enacting the Occupied Territories Bill.

With a national economy extraordinarily dependent upon US investment, and the State bound to the EU’s expanding security priorities, Ireland’s economy has become increasingly bound up with others’ geopolitical projects.

Key here is international concern with the security of technology and energy supply chains. The protection of subsea fibre optic cables, energy interconnectors, gas pipelines, and offshore wind energy is now pushed as a reason for Ireland to enter new European maritime security partnerships. But who are these infrastructures being protected against, and who is served by this incremental militarisation of Ireland’s marine territory?

Ireland is host to infrastructures crucial to US big tech. The scale of these infrastructural investments — with scores of data centres in Dublin’s suburbs serving cloud companies such as Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft and supporting European cloud traffic — puts Ireland on the radar for debates around data security and sovereignty. These data centres are energy hogs, using 21% of Ireland’s daily electricity in 2023 — making it a global outlier. Due to the centrality of US FDI in Ireland’s economic policy, political leaders and industrial groups have sought to adapt Ireland’s grid infrastructure and energy plans to suit continued data centre expansion.

Tech companies and their data centres also require low-latency, high-speed fibre optic connections to circulate data traffic — which means cables. These undersea cables are the subject of increasing concern about Russian hacking and interference, with reports of Russian submarines in the Irish Sea raising alarm late last year. This occurred around the same time a new Nato patrol was launched in the Baltic Sea to protect undersea cables. With so much of the green, digital transition proposed to occur through maritime infrastructures such as cables, energy generation, and pipelines that need ‘protection’ from geopolitical threats, Ireland is poised to be a key focus of what Thea Riofrancos has called the emerging ‘security-sustainability nexus’.

More pertinent questions

Rather than willingly embrace a future of escalating insecurity and conflict as inevitable, Ireland’s political leaders should be asking more pertinent questions: Why are Russian submarines interested in cables on Ireland’s seafloor in the first place? What is Ireland’s economic dependence on US tech exposing us to? And, with US tech companies providing cloud partnerships for Israel’s AI targeting systems in Gaza, is complicity in genocide a moral cost we are willing to pay for economic dependency?

For many mainstream commentators, deepening Ireland’s dependency on the US and Europe, including via security pacts, serves to protect ‘Irish interests’. But whose interests are being protected by attacks on neutrality?

Undermining neutrality is not only about revising Ireland’s role in the world system but locking the country into alliances with actors content to destabilise the world for their economic and geopolitical interests, at any cost. Becoming an infrastructural node provisioning the economic and security interests of the US and EU means that Ireland may in fact become a target for their geopolitical rivals — Russia and China — and hence require ‘protection’. This would also demand a greater percentage of Irish revenues flowing from social security to national security, as these commentators are quick to advise.

This scenario is certainly not in the interests of ordinary people in Ireland, for whom accessible and affordable housing, healthcare, and meaningful climate action far outstrip interest in joining imperialist wars.

Much of the commentary on Ireland’s neutrality is delivered with familiar paternalism.

We are repeatedly told that the decision-makers in London, Brussels, and Washington are ‘baffled’ at our commitment to neutrality. To them, Ireland needs to ‘grow up’ and set aside misguided attachments to the past. It is no surprise that we hear the same sentiments, from the same commentators, when it comes to Palestine solidarity or President Higgins’ statements on international justice.

It is important to note that the desire to defend Ireland’s neutrality is not the preserve of the ‘loony left’, as tenured trolls on X might have us believe. Indeed, neutrality has often found its most potent proponents among the establishment parties now in Government.

In 1957, amid escalating Cold War tension, Ireland’s UN representative Frank Aiken voted for a resolution to debate China’s inclusion in the UN. Fine Gael, supported by the Church and a conservative media, came out strongly against Aiken for scaring off potential US investment. “Does this entice anybody or make them more amenable to come to us and help us here if we take up that attitude, when we act in an independent and, I may say, irresponsible fashion?” questioned one Fine Gael TD in the Dáil.

Aiken’s response was that as an independent country, it was a betrayal of neutrality to align with one side over another in the Cold War, regardless of the short-term economic interests. “The hope for a just and stable peace,” he said in a 1958 speech at the UN, “lies not in the perpetuation of ‘iron curtains’, lines of containment, ‘cold war’ propaganda, and astronomically costly defence expenditure.” Rather, for Aiken, it lay in nuclear disarmament and channelling resources towards the development of the newly decolonised Third World.

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Central to any public debate over Ireland’s alignments in the world must be a clear understanding of what’s at stake: do we want to throw our lot in with rising militarism, a ‘new cold war’, genocide, and abandon international law; or do we want to cultivate our proud history of international development, peacebuilding, and solidarity with colonised peoples, while continuing to play an outsized role in building a world governed by international law and diplomatic co-operation?

This choice must lie with the people of Ireland. It is too important to be left to the self-appointed ‘adults in the room’.

• Dr Patrick Bresnihan is associate professor, Department of Geography, Maynooth University; Dr Rory Rowan is assistant professor, Geography, TCD, and Dr Patrick Brodie is lecturer/assistant professor and Ad Astra Fellow in UCD’s School of Information and Communication Studies.