I’m glad to see the issue of Irish military neutrality back in the news again, since I have long believed that our current policy is immoral. That is not to say that it is always immoral to remain neutral, and that it is necessary to pick a side in every single conflict. Rather, it is to say that it is immoral to retain our current policy of insisting on neutrality no matter what the nature of any given conflict is.
This isn’t just a military issue (and it is certainly the case that I know little of military matters). It is an ethical position about conflict and violence in general, from the smallest scales to the largest. Consider a group of young men walking through Dublin city centre. Imagine that they happen upon a situation where a boy is violently assaulting a girl. We could imagine that the young men are in their twenties, whereas the boy and girl are say sixteen years old. What would we think of those young men if they passed by this violent assault while remaining neutral and refusing to take a side? Would it be ethical to watch the girl be repeatedly kicked in the head without intervening to save her life? Would we be impressed if the young men pompously announced that they would adopt a morally superior position of neutrality between the aggressor and the victim? I don’t believe so.
Of course, this is not to say that it is always incumbent upon passers by to intervene in every situation they happen upon. This is not to say that there are no circumstances in which neutrality is the correct position. It is to say that it is trivially easy to think of situations where neutrality is unethical, such that a blanket policy of remaining neutral in all circumstances is immoral.
We can also scale the same principles up to much larger conflicts involving the most abhorrent wholesale violence. It is certainly the case that there can be some international military conflicts where neutrality is the correct position for Ireland. In fact, I think that this may be the case for most conflicts. However, it is also trivially easy to describe circumstances in which neutrality is unethical. Russia is a dictatorship that has initiated a brutal war of aggression against a democratic neighbour. Their military has a policy of attacking civilian targets, executing prisoners, and abducting children by the thousands. There have also been credible reports of torture and rape as frequent behaviours of the Russian military in Ukraine. As these Russian armoured columns advance into each subsequent Ukrainian town, a means of defence is desperately required. Ireland retains dozens of shoulder-launched missiles that have been designed for just this defensive purpose, but based on our policy of neutrality we are keeping them in storage instead of donating them to the Ukrainian military.
It is absolutely disgusting that Ireland would have a self-preening and morally superior attitude, as they explain to Ukraine that the ethical thing to do is to deny these tools to those defending their country against the Russian army. It is appalling that Ireland would look at a Ukrainian soldier in a trench, who is observing a Russian armoured column advancing on his position, and explain that the moral thing to do is to deny them the means to defend themselves. This is no different in principle from a group of young men who would watch a girl get kicked to death in the street by a boy, while congratulating themselves for remaining neutral on the merits of those involved.
In fact, the current Irish policy is even worse than this. At present, Ireland cannot commit military resources to any conflict without the prior approval of the UN Security Council. That means that we have awarded to Russia a veto over any military assistance that Ireland may wish to provide. That is an utterly insane principle for Ireland to adhere to.
At the time of writing, the battles between the Russian and Ukrainian forces are continuing in the Kursk region, which has historical resonances suggesting that the rest of Europe is unlikely to remain uninvolved and untouched by this conflict. However, there are other practical implications of Irish neutrality that also imply adverse consequences worth worrying about.
A Russian “spy ship” has apparently been mapping undersea cables in Irish waters, in circumstances where Russian ships have severed multiple such cables in the Baltic Sea. In response to that, Finland boarded and confiscated the Russian ships involved, and the Estonian Navy has begun closely escorting Russian ships that are behaving suspiciously. Ireland has a GDP greater than that of Estonia and Finland combined, yet we can only put one naval ship to sea at a time, and that vessel has no working guns. The last time the Russian Navy proposed to carry out live fire exercises off the Irish coast, it was our fishing boats that confronted them.
Even though our policy of neutrality contributes to Ireland having inadequately funded Defence Forces, it is often argued that this remains the best policy since the alternative is sending young people into harm’s way. The hypocrisy of our policy though is that we already do send young people into harm’s way. It’s just that it’s the young people of other countries, who better fund their militaries and do this on our behalf. When Russian bombers invade Irish-controlled airspace, it is RAF fighter jets that intercept them, based on an arrangement that Ireland has with the UK. Is this really a situation that Irish people are supposed to be proud of? Does this kind of purported neutrality really make us more ethical? I don’t think so.
Military policies in Ireland contain many holdovers from a world that is long since gone. Just one minor example of this, is the fact that we pay a chaplain twice as much to carry a Bible into a church, as we pay a private to carry a rifle into a foxhole. Ireland should fund our Defence Forces for the modern world, in the knowledge that it contains real malign threats. This country is not immune to those threats and it is immoral to remain neutral as between the malign and the benign.