Ireland’s Neutrality Stitch-Up
A city councillor who was expelled from Ireland’s forum on neutrality explains how the format was skewed to pro-war views – and why a citizens’ assembly should be held in its place.
Pro-neutrality protesters interrupted Tánaiste Micheál Martin's address at the four-day Consultative Forum on International Security Policy. (Credit: Connolly Youth Movement)
The current Tánaiste (deputy prime minister), foreign minister and defence minister, Mícheál Martin, is using his last eighteen months in office to coordinate a shift in Ireland’s foreign policy away from an eroded notion of neutrality to align more closely with an increasingly interventionist EU and an expanded NATO. His alma mater, University College Cork, was the first port of call for his ‘Consultative Forum on International Security Policy’ on 22 June. I attended this meeting as a Cork city councillor intending to defend the remaining tenets of Ireland’s contradictory ‘neutrality’ against what seems like a juggernaut of ‘expert’ opinion advocating for Ireland to follow Sweden and Finland in reorienting towards NATO in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
I was ejected for attempting to raise a point of order with the chair, Louise Richardson, after peaceful protestors were forcibly removed from the venue by police. My point was that contrary to the parameters of the ‘debate’ Richardson was outlining in her opening remarks, this consultative forum was a one-way sermon on why our present policy needed to change without any opposition representatives being given programmed speaking slots. This was to be neither a debate nor a public consultation in any meaningful sense; most of all, it was certainly not to have a neutral chair. Opposition politicians in the room were mere ‘voices from the floor’ at the mercy of roaming microphones while the programmed speakers were at the pulpit. I was escorted out, my details taken and told not to come back.
Later in the day, panellists who had previously spoken at events funded by arms manufacturers and who have publicly supported NATO denied knowledge of key issues such as the US military’s use of Shannon Airport. Several speakers tactlessly undermined the veneer that the forum was not about ending neutrality. While some opposition politicians addressed the forum from the floor, their contributions were bundled into the reportage of fair hearing and ‘consensus’ from various Irish national media outlets. German and French international media outlets were more straightforward in their reportage: the purpose of the forum was to question neutrality.
A Predetermined Pantomime
The dates of a vague-sounding Irish government roadshow on neutrality were announced in May, in the same week Cork’s harbour was the venue for an informal meeting of EU and NATO naval ‘top brass’ to discuss the security threat posed by Russian vessels. This coincided with the much-publicised delivery of two armed vessels from New Zealand to Cork for the Irish naval service. A metaphor for some of the contradictions of Ireland’s foreign and defence policy, the two second-hand vessels arrived in Cork piggybacked on a contracted cargo transporter awaiting further ‘regeneration’ works before they could be rendered seaworthy. The reason for their purchase at €26.5 million? They can be operated with a skeleton crew, solving a HR problem for an Irish naval service unwilling to pay its personnel enough to sustainably crew its four other operational vessels.
In the weeks that followed, a drip-drip of information about a ‘Consultative Forum on International Security Policy’ detailed a public consultation process on changing Ireland’s official policy of neutrality lasting a mere five weeks. The online submission portal is a loaded questionnaire starting with a yes/no question, ‘In view of the current global security environment, do you perceive Ireland’s security to be under threat?’. As a Cork city councillor, I routinely engage with 12-week consultation processes on non-geopolitical issues like greenways and bus lanes, which allow for a freer expression of ideas and objections.
The publication of the programme for four days of ‘debate’ in university campuses in Cork and Galway and, oddly, the former seat of British colonial power in Ireland at Dublin Castle revealed a slew of pro-NATO hawks drawn from academia and industry alongside a smattering of NGO speakers and one solitary anti-NATO campaigner. The official line, even after President Michael D Higgins rebuked the forum as being part of ‘a drift towards NATO’, is that the forum in no way intends to provoke a change in Ireland’s policy of neutrality and certainly not in the direction of NATO membership. The facts of the matter demonstrate otherwise.
A Neutered Neutrality
The notion of such a cosseted consultation process to answer a question nobody is asking is contradictory enough even without considering the paradoxical realities of what additional defence, military, logistical or political weight Ireland might add to an already polarised geopolitical context. But Ireland’s idea of its own ‘neutrality’ is itself riven with contradictions. Even as I turned up to the first forum event in Cork, I had to ask myself what neutrality I was there to defend. Ireland’s neutrality is a slippery concept by design. It is not, as many believe, an explicit constitutional provision but a British-style convention recognised in the 2001 Seville Declaration as a ‘traditional policy of military neutrality’, something a previous government involving Mícheál Martin conceded to the public for the adoption of the Treaty of Nice.
Contradictorily, we are closely woven into the logistics of modern imperialism. US warplanes and military supply aircraft have routinely used Shannon Airport since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Section 110 of the Irish tax code provides ‘special vehicles’ for Russian weapons manufacturers involved in military supply for the invasion of Ukraine. Irish ministers have been among the most ardent cheerleaders, rather than neutral scrutineers, of Ursula von der Leyen’s reckless leadership of the EU on this matter, among others.
Concretely, the issues at stake in the Forum are the form and purpose of peacekeeping duties such as the United Nations Interim Force In Lebanon [UNIFIL] mission in southern Lebanon, the functionality of the ‘Triple Lock’ on Irish military deployments, and the value of neutrality in obtaining international roles such as Ireland’s present election to the UN Security Council. These are all mechanisms holding back a more interventionist foreign policy, and the purpose of the Forum is to question their relevance. There is an economic imperative for Ireland, where the Foreign Direct Investment growth model relies increasingly on diversification of the country’s offer as a fiscal, capital, informational and logistical conduit for global powers. With neutrality neutered, ‘the best little country to do business in’ can open itself to an array of investors which, to date, have confined themselves to making missiles north of the border in Belfast and Derry.
Neutrality to people like Mícheál Martin means speaking out of both sides of your mouth. The day before the forum, Martin was in London reaffirming support for the EU-NATO approach at London’s Ukraine Recovery Conference and in a bilateral with UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly. In the course of proceedings, protocol went out the window with a warm congratulatory tweet to the new right-wing pro-NATO foreign minister of Finland.
An Alternative Neutrality
Nobody is asking questions about Ireland’s policy of neutrality, but if they were, the Repeal campaign of 2018 has already given us an appropriate mechanism: Citizens’ Assemblies.
I was involved in the citizens’ assembly set up to conduct public consultation on the repeal of the 8th Amendment to the Irish constitution in 2018, paving the way for the provision of abortion services. Great care was taken at this time to achieve balance in public debates, with much longer periods and more openness to views from the public. The referendum held in 2018 is held up as a model for such civic engagement processes on sensitive issues, even if governments since then have reneged on putting in place the services the referendum result demanded.
Were a citizens’ assembly used to address this question, the result might well be an unwelcome one for the government because polling on the neutrality issue shows that an overwhelming majority of people in Ireland are in favour of more neutrality rather than less. A citizens’ assembly would allow for the alternative to ending neutrality to be framed as building upon our neutrality rather than simply doing nothing. The framing of the consultative forum presents a ‘there is no alternative’ prospectus.
Global geopolitical realignment should produce renewed space for neutral countries able to act as brokers between belligerents. The alternative is clearly to enhance our neutrality and properly remunerate, equip and train an expert military for social purposes at home and abroad. Rather than sitting in camps in Lebanon, Irish personnel could be addressing energy and food security in that country and assisting refugees elsewhere as a trusted partner. Instead, Mícheál Martin wants to trade it all for a seat in the situation room.