Hi my name is Fionn Wallace. My experience is working in the Irish parliament or Dáil Eireann as gaeilge from 2012 to 2019 and then I went over to Brussels to the European Parliament from 2019 to 2024 where I worked almost exclusively on the Foreign Affairs and Security and Defence committees.
Since May, Niamh Ni Bhriain from Transnational Institute and myself have been travelling around the 32 counties of Ireland doing public education events about the threat to Irish neutrality coming from the Dublin Government. We did our 42nd Roadshow event this Wednesday.
Today’s subject of discussion is ‘would the republic of Ireland be a model for an Independent Wales to follow.’ In a nutshell, no, and I will explain why through the prism of Irish neutrality.
I’d start by saying that the framing of this discussion is problematic. The republic of Ireland as laid out in the title refers to a 26 county jurisdiction that was violently severed from the six counties still under British rule. It is a republic that any republican would reject. It is a colonialist construct.
As a brief history lesson – Ireland was under British rule for centuries. In 1920 the island was partitioned with six counties set to remain under British rule and 26 counties eventually becoming the Irish ‘ free state’ in 1922, swearing allegiance to the British crown. In 1949 the 26 counties formally became a republic. This is not the republic we fought for or want and so I would never consider that an incomplete, partitioned republic should ever be a model for Welsh independence. The struggle must be one of full independence and sovereignty and the creation of a 32 county socialist republic free of British rule but also free of EU and US influence.
This issue of neutrality exposes so many contradictions about Ireland, the role we play in the world, the sorry state of our bourgeois democracy, our sovereignty in the context of our EU membership and our – for lack of a better word – special relationship with the United States and Britain.
For some brief context that I will explore more fully later. Irish neutrality has been chipped away at for decades by successive governments and is now under threat in an existential way. The government is, under pressure from the EU and NATO, in the process of moving legislation that will dismantle a longstanding policy that governs the deployment of Irish troops overseas called the Triple Lock. This mechanism ensures that any deployment of more than 12 Irish troops abroad must have a United Nations mandate. It is the last protection for Irish neutrality, and without it we open up the possibility of Irish defence forces being sent to fight and die in illegal imperialist wars and interventions initiated by the EU or NATO outside of the UN mandate system.
So the question becomes why is the government so willing to have us abandon our neutrality and throw in our lot with the EU and NATO, with the axis of genocide.
Comrade Tommy McKearney addressed this when he in wrote in April last year:
“It is the US-led promotion of untrammelled, free-market capitalism that ultimately motivates the Irish ruling class’s desire to be immersed in what is often referred to as the Washington Consensus. To maintain its standing within this neoliberal compact, our comprador bourgeoisie hope to ingratiate themselves via any and every concession necessary, up to and including … surrender to imperialist militarism.”
During the Neutrality Roadshow we have had the pleasure to present alongside academics like Rory Rowan, Paddy Bresnihan, Karen Devine and others who each have distinct takes on this question. While they each would agree as I do with Comrade McKearney’s analysis, they often provide a narrative history that tells just how structurally and ideologically deep this relationship between our elites and Western imperialism is.
Paddy Bresnihan has an excellent new book out with Pat Brodie called From the Bog to the Cloud. In it they dismantle so much mythology around why Ireland has the economy it does. There is a story told by the likes of Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole about how Ireland’s economic modernisation and entry into social and cultural modernity was initiated with the 1958 publication of T.K Whitaker’s white paper simply called ‘Economic Development’. This story begins with failed import-substitution projects driven by a nationalist and conservative Fianna Fail trying to reduce dependence on Britain. And it is far-sighted bureaucrats like Whitaker who were wise enough to set Ireland on a path of export-orientated industrialisation and liberalisation.
What this narrative leaves out is how Ireland’s attempts to delink from Britain were compromised from the beginning, in large part because of constant attempts by the Brits to sabotage the newly formed Free State and subsequently the Republic. The first governments were not only not radical, they were hampered by a comprador class determined to keep the existing dependent economic relations with Britain intact. At the time this was large cattle farmers and their middlemen. Other colonial structural relations were left untouched. We maintained currency parity with the British pound until the 1970s. Private banks refused to issue loans at affordable rates, preferring to transfer funds to Britain instead.
The state had no appetite to challenge this or exercise any restraint on private enterprise or pursue nationalisation of key industries. The peat extraction for energy production enterprise, Bord na Mona, was an exception to the rule. All this was compounded by a conservative civil service inherited from the colonial era.
After the second world war US Marshall Aid flowed into Ireland from 1948. It came as loans with serious strings attached: an early example of structural adjustment. The US encouraged industrial production for export. In the discussions around what would make Ireland eligible for the aid the US insisted on the end of any kind of protectionism, and opening the Irish economy to free trade, particularly with Europe. Here was the beginning, in 1948, of the US policy of using Ireland as a platform into more protected European markets. The Irish Development Agency was established in 1949 with lots of US guidance and so began Ireland’s history of dropping its pants for foreign investors, in a race to the bottom of legal systems for sale to international capital.
There’s not time here to go over more detail on this, but I would highly recommend you pick up the book when it comes out shortly. It builds on a bunch of other work but does a lot to explore the idea of Ireland as a state that effectively became a laboratory for neo-colonialism. As Kwame Nkrumah wrote in 1965 – “The essence of neo-colonialism is that the state which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside”.
This brings us to the European Union. Ireland joined the European Economic Community at the same time as England, Wales, and Scotland in 1973. It became the European Union in 1993 following on from the Maastricht treaty in 1992.
It was framed as an economic, not a military union. The history of the drift away from the lofty founding principles of the bloc is too long to go into here, but it is really with the Nice and Lisbon treaties that the project fully morphs into a military one.
We are a place now where the drive to militarism across the bloc, supercharged by the Ukraine war, means there is simply no tolerance for neutral, independent, or even sovereign states.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine consolidated the control of the Atlanticist camp and NATO over the European Union. It was used to massively increase military spending, an agenda being pushed heavily by US empire that plays out through NATO as a tool of that imperial project. Political dissent and opposing views on the conflict and the advancing EU militarism were shut down. Talk of peace or diplomacy by political opposition figures got them denounced as agents of Russia, or enemies of EU values.
Three and a half years later the war in Ukraine rages on, it was never allowed to stop. One of the most striking examples of this was when NATO scuppered the peace deal agreed between Kyiv and Moscow in May 2022. The Russian threat is being kept as visceral and real for as long as it takes to sever the EU from any possible future other than a fully militarised, economically broken vassal of the United States.
Foreign policy is solely a member state competence in the EU, and yet the European Commission has been acting outside its remit driven by President Von Der Leyen and the High Commissioner for Foreign Affairs Kaja Kallas, who behave like the Atlanticist generals of the entire bloc. Although Article 41.2 of the EU Treaty prohibits the use of budget funds for military purposes, under Von Der Leyen’s leadership these unlawful practices have been permitted. Military spending is now reframed as an industrial measure or competitiveness promotion. The number of EU and national laws that have been broken to get us to this point is evidence of what amounts to a slow motion coup by the military industry complex and NATO.
There has always been pressure from NATO to spend more on weapons but this second iteration of the Trump regime has a somewhat different dynamic. The calls to increase military spending and buy more US weapons are more like orders backed by economic threats.
To understand what is happening here and dispel any notion that Trump and the US are abandoning the EU or NATO it is instructive to look at the philosophy that drives a highly influential arm of the US administration today. American Conservative Realism. Trump’s undersecretary for war policy, Elbridge Colby is the main guy behind this thinking.
Colby argues that the evolving geopolitical reality has exposed US limitations. The US must recognise these limits to its capacity and as such should avoid pursuing previous policies of full spectrum global dominance.
American “primacism” must be rejected in favour of a coalition of strong like-minded allies. The US must focus its limited abilities on the real challenge to US interests – the People’s Republic of China – and push allies to build their strength, buy loads of US made weapons, and look after their own spheres of interest in order to better facilitate the collective sabotage and containment of Chinese development.
To sell these orders from Trump and NATO to the people of Europe we are bombarded with narratives of endless threats to Ireland and the EU. The US is unreliable, Russia is under every bed, and China is off sharpening its knives somewhere in the wings. There is a climate of insecurity that can only be remedied by more militarism.
This is in tandem with the EU rolling out various ambitious plans. In March the European Commission presented the ReArm Europe plan which aims to get EU defence spending across the bloc up to 3.5% of GDP, or around €680 billion euros per year, by 2030 . Also announced was the SAFE programme – a €150 billion loan fund for military procurement and investments. Another 1.5% of GDP rise in spending will go towards military related expenditure. This will encompass research and development programmes and most significantly military mobility. Investments in rail, road, bridges and so on. All the infrastructure required to get all our new weapons equipment and troops to the front in record time. A massive recruitment drive is underway and according to Commission documents the goal is to increase standing armies across the EU by an additional 800,000 troops in the next 3 to 4 years.
Effectively, the EU Commission is ensuring that by 2030, the EU will be spending €970 billion euros a year on war preparation. That is more than half what the entire EU bloc spends on healthcare at the moment.
This is framed as prolonging the Ukraine war and ultimately preparing for a massive land war with Russia. The EU Commission white paper on defence readiness 2030 makes this crystal clear. But the Ukraine war itself is creating multiple crises in Europe.
Debt is ballooning and the Russian sanctions have rebounded to hurt the EU. The Ukraine war costs $100 billion a year and the EU is increasingly footing the bill.
Germany amended its debt brake to free up €900 billion for military spending over the next 5 years but simultaneously says it can no longer afford social services. France and England are on the verge of asking the IMF for bailout loans. Several member states have external debt of over 100% of GDP.
As everyone here is surely aware, the Ukraine war and loss of access to cheap Russian gas is deindustrialising the EU.
Large scale layoffs and factory closures continue. Germany lost more than 125,000 industrial jobs since this August, primarily in the car industry. I don’t think people in Europe appreciate how bad the situation in Germany is at the moment and how serious the implications of that are for the Eurozone more broadly.
The response from the Commission to this economic crisis has been to propose deregulation measures, in particular to ditch environmental protection and digital safety regulations. Effectively to sacrifice peoples and health and safety to increase corporate profits.
To fund increased militarisation domestic spending will be cut. Austerity is effectively baked into the EU treaties , which make significant state investment or anything resembling socialist development models illegal in the EU. This permanent austerity is now compounded by a severe energy and cost of living crisis and now a further round of austerity to militarise the EU. As Mark Rutte, the new NATO secretary general told the European Parliament earlier this year, ““On average, European countries easily spend up to a quarter of their national income on pensions, health and social security systems, and we need only a small fraction of that money to make defense much stronger”. This is not to mention the pandemic related debt that is due to start being paid back in 2029.
None of this is adding up financially and there will be political costs. The question is who will capitalise on them. Reactionary forces are on the rise and already in power in Austria, Hungary, and Italy. US pressure to reach the 5% NATO spending target in order to avoid excessive tariffs means the political projects of the likes of Merz, Macron, and Starmer are committing political suicide by implementing deeply unpopular budget cuts. This is at a time of economic crisis across Europe and levels of inequality and material deprivation not seen since the 2008 crash. The far right in Germany, France, Britain and elsewhere are making huge gains by criticising pro-war liberal internationalist forces and focusing on real domestic issues.
For now, Ireland only manages to escape the extremes of the economic woes of our European neighbours because of windfall corporation tax receipts from US multinationals based there. Our long-standing dependence on this source of revenue is not only unethical because we facilitate the theft of resources that are much needed by publics all over the world, particularly in Global South countries. It is also a high risk strategy that both leaves us vulnerable to shifts in US policy and forfeits our sovereignty when it comes to domestic or international policy decisions that may upset the US.
We have seen this dynamic and contradictions heighten significantly since the onset of the so-called global ‘war on terror’ and in particular with the NATO-orchestrated genocide in Gaza. Shannon has been provided for use as a US military forward airbase from which it has waged imperialist warfare killing and maiming millions and displacing millions more.
It has also been used in direct violation of international law for the transfer weapons and munitions to the genocide in Gaza. We know now that the Occupied Territories bill was stalled for 7 years, and will likely never see the light of day in any form that has any teeth, because of pressure from the US and Israel. Ireland’s trade with Israel has increased from €198 million in 2020 to €3.24 billion in 2024 primarily because of our profit-shifting services.
There are many ways in which Ireland is forfeiting its sovereignty while simultaneously further embedding us in the structures of empire. From the datacentre explosion that has us complicit in rapidly advancing AI warfare and mass surveillance, to the rapid expansion of dual use technology production for empires wars.
While the term ‘complicit’ indicates agency, the genocide in Gaza has deeply exposed just how diminished Irish sovereignty is.
While Ireland is regarded by many as a vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause and a critic of Israel, in reality nothing could be further from the truth. We have consistently allowed our airports and airspace to be used by the NATO war machine for the transit of troops and weapons to the genocide. Our government twice voted down motions that would stop our central bank being the site of sale for Israeli war bonds. We have been increasing trade with Israel to the point where our tiny country is their second biggest trading partner.
And we have the aforementioned bill that would ban trade with the Occupied Territories that passed its first two stages, and has been languishing in limbo since 2019.
Sustained pressure and protest from the Irish public who are fiercely in solidarity with Palestine has forced the government to say and do the right things as long as they were merely performative. When it came to material measures like the Occupied Territories bill real threats came from the US to the effect that they would pull out their multinationals and use our tax haven services less. Nearly one 5th of all US profit shifting for tax evasion happens in Ireland.
We are at a crossroads where the choice about where we turn now is being rapidly undermined and taken away from us. The plan is for Ireland to follow Finland and Sweden, end our neutrality, and cosy up to NATO. The triple lock has to go, as it is the very last protection on our neutrality. It is all that stands in the way of the governemnt sending our sons and daughters to fight and die in illegal wars that are being willed into existence by elites that support genocide as a matter of official policy and have nothing to offer the people of europe but immiseration and fear.
And just to be crystal clear about what the Irish government is proposing. If they get rid of the triple lock, the minister of the day will be allowed, with a whipped Dáil majority, to send a limitless number of Irish defence forces to fight and die in any EU or NATO led intervention.
Without the whipped Dáil majority, the minister will be allowed to send up to 100 defence forces wherever they like with no discussion beyond the government cabinet. This is all spelled out in the Defence Amendment Bill 2025, but in the mainstream discourse no-one ever asks questions about this or discusses it in public.
There is no democratic mandate for these moves by the Irish government. The Irish people rejected two referendums on the ratification of EU treaties on the basis of fears that we would be dragged into EU military structures. Only when we got a special provision that specifically protected Irish neutrality in the context of these treaty reforms did the Irish people ratify the Nice and Lisbon treaties. Now the government is moving to change a policy that is as old as the state, without going back to the people.
Dr. Karen Devine research has shown that Irish people’s attachment to neutrality is deeply linked to our understanding of ourselves as a people and the importance we attach to independence. The government’s anti-democratic attack on Irish neutrality will subordinate our independence to imperialist powers and endanger our Defense Forces. Our sons and daughters will be coming home maimed, traumatised, or in body-bags for the interests of the same powers that are doing to Gaza today what the British did to the Irish in the mid-1800s. Our comprador politicians have no understanding of the concept of sovereignty, of independence, of our history, of what it means to be true to your roots.
What we effectively have in Ireland is an unfinished revolution. The politicians in the Dáil are nothing more than managers working on behalf of domestic elites and foreign capital. As long as these forces remain influential, even if we leave the EU, we will just run headlong into the arms of England or the US who already have such entrenched financial interests on our island.
Even the way the British establishment talks about Ireland is as if it is taken for granted we have no sovereignty. There was an event in the House of Lords last month on the subject of Irish reunification. Rear Admiral Chris Parry was invited on to our national broadcaster to report its findings. He told a fawning interviewer that a united Ireland would pose a strategic threat to Britain. That we would effectively become an obstacle to Britain’s ability to repel attacks from Russian and Chinese ships firing an assault from off the West coast of Ireland. That Britain needed a massive radar stationed in the West of Ireland. That Ireland should join NATO, have NATO bases and troops stationed on our island, have NATO exercises in the Irish economic zone off our West coast. That neutrality was a strange idea. And we need to have a common defence and security policy between Britain and Ireland that addresses British security concerns. That any moves towards nuclear free zones or any neutrality would upset British military plans. He then ended by joking with the presenter about there being a lot of talent in Ireland, that the Irish were great fighters and it was something in the temperament.
In the House of Lords in September they were talking about how Ireland needs to either work around its neutrality and rapidly increase military spending or be presented with a bill for defence services provided by Britain. The Irish and British governments are currently working on a defence pact that they hope to have finialised next year.
On the Britain/EU level there are talks in the works that would see Britain pay into the EU budget in exchange for access to the European electricity market and access the new funds for EU war preparation.
Get Brexit undone, as a friend of mine likes to joke. The fortunes of Britain and the EU are ultimately tied together it would seem. Mainly due to the shared proclivity for delusion that prevails either side of the English Channel.
Almut Rochowanski had a great article published in Jacobin on Thursday evening. In it she tries to make sense of the logic behind the war preparation overdrive and the EU obsession with keeping the war in Ukraine going.
She suggests that not fully understanding the US moves to rejig their previous policy of American Primacy, European elites are committing economic self-harm and debasing themselves, expecting that the reward – continued vicarious enjoyment of American Primacy – is worth the steep price.
“Alternatively” she writes, “some Europeans fantasize about a free-standing European hegemony outside of America’s shadow, as the world’s third great power. Europe has form: the British saw the colonization of the world as the “white man’s burden,” the French as their “mission civilisatrice,” and the Germans, less famously, claimed the German essence could heal the world. Today the EU serves both as a plane for projecting delusions of supremacy and as a bureaucratic machine for acting on them.”
The fact of the matter is that both Ireland and Wales, in or out of the European Union will be caught up in the twisted logics of these incompetent, delusional, supremacist elite forces on a warpath that will destroy Europe.
As communists we understand, like James Connolly did, that nationalism without socialism will never bring independence. In his 1897 essay Nationalism and Socialism Connolly wrote, “If you remove the English army to-morrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain.
England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.”
Given the balance of forces at the present conjuncture it is the task of communists to fight back against the senseless rush to war that is gathering steam in Europe. To organise, debate, and educate in order to end the escalation and expose the threat of the arms race. And ultimately find a path to peace.
Even if we fail in this effort and war returns to Europe, the effort itself will go some way to help us prepare for the tumultuous times that will come, and for the possible opportunities that will naturally spill out from such an upheaval.
