Ireland has prided itself on neutrality and commitment to multilateral institutions, but the current government in Dublin is preparing a major change.
As multiple international conflicts test the West’s resolve to support the international order, Ireland is on the brink of fundamentally changing its policy toward global security.
Micheál Martin, who currently serves as both defence minister and Tánaiste (deputy prime minister), told the Irish parliament this week that he is planning to reform the country’s longstanding “triple lock” policy, which says Ireland can only deploy troops abroad with the explicit consent of three parties: the government, the parliament, and the UN Security Council.
Explaining the plan, Martin said that Ireland’s military “agility and responsiveness” would greatly benefit from removing the UN requirement, which effectively means that the US, Russia, China, France and the UK all enjoy unilateral vetoes over Irish military deployments.
“By making this change in the future, we would be removing the veto power of Security Council members over Ireland’s engagement, while safeguarding the essential link with international law and good governance,” he said.
His remarks came after the Irish government convened a forum to discuss the country’s official policy of neutrality, which has held sway for decades. It is not a member of NATO, making it relatively unusual in the EU, and maintains a military of well under 10,000 servicemembers that has almost exclusively been deployed on UN peacekeeping missions.
While the forum did not lead to a mandate to end the policy of neutrality, it left open the possibly of “reform” to the triple lock policy. The reaction from much of the Irish left to Martin’s ensuing announcement has ranged from concern to anger.
In a parliamentary debate on Thursday, Martin was accused of trying to short-circuit public opinion with the policy, which a Sinn Fein opponent demanded he put to a referendum. Martin responded by pointing out that Sinn Fein’s current leader, Mary Lou McDonald, had “erected a statue to Seán Russell, who collaborated with the German Nazis. That is the history of your commitment to military neutrality.”
So why is this issue so heated, why is Ireland debating it – and why now?
The long view
Foreign policy expert Eoin McNamara of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs told Euronews that Dublin has little choice but to face up to reality. “Irish leaders have not been too interested in geopolitics, but geopolitics has started to become interested in their country,” he said.
“Ireland has been geopolitically sheltered for much of its independent history since 1922,” McNamara said, “and crises involving major military conflict have usually not directly affected the safety of its population.
“Multilateralism and the UN are very important in Irish foreign policy, and the triple lock is an acknowledgement of this in some ways. There has been a paranoid fear that without a UN Security Council mandate, an Irish government at some stage might sanction significant Irish military involvement in a war of aggression.”
But as McNamara sees it, the explicitly pro-UN position held by many defenders of the triple lock does not take account of the full picture.
“Because of the country’s sheltered position, some naïve outlooks have been allowed to dominate the Irish debate. Multilateralism, humanitarianism and peacekeeping are all dimensions of the UN, but the UN also has other less idealist dimensions. It is also an arena for power politics, as is vividly illuminated by great power behaviour at the UN Security Council. This latter point is rarely raised in much detail in the Irish debate.”
This point was driven home by Martin in parliament, where he pointed to the unfolding conflicts in Ukraine and Israel-Palestine as examples of why waiting for the Security Council out of respect for multilateralism does not necessarily make sense.
“We have to be honest about the fact that in respect of many of the worst crises internationally, where rapid, impartial and decisive international action is desperately needed, the Council has not been able to act,” he said.