The undemocratic attack on Irish neutrality by the Government has reached a fever pitch. As a neutral country we should be using the EU Presidency to promote peace and dialogue to end conflicts and to encourage the EU to pull back from increasing militarisation. In effect, quite the opposite is happening. The Irish EU presidency is barely two months in and it is being fully utilised to undermine and assault our tradition of neutrality that goes back beyond the formation of the Irish state, to Connolly and Wolfe Tone before him.
The EU leadership, the Government and the media worked in tandem to drum up inflation of threats, the new Red Scare, and talk of Ireland as the weak link in EU defence. The result? New military spending commitments, high level talks with Britain about joining a North Atlantic naval alliance, and talk of joining an EU-led military mission in Lebanon.
Much of this was discussed at an informal meeting of EU defence ministers at the Druids Glen hotel on Tuesday September 1st. Roads were closed, airspace restrictions were in place and a maritime exclusion zone was imposed. While a Royal Navy ship and a helicopter searching for submarines patrolled Irish waters, government ministers were challenged by a pliant media gallery about the low level of military spending in Ireland. Minister McEntee responded by giving an assurance that Irish military spending “will continue to increase.” McEntee also said Ireland was committed to increasing military cooperation with European neighbours in the realm of maritime security and military technology.
Advancing the programme laid out in the National Maritime Security Strategy published in February, the media blitz on neutrality this week included reports on the start of high level talks to have Ireland included in the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF). The JEF is a 10-nation military alliance led by Britain that has as its main aim to harass Russian commercial shipping in international waters. As a neutral country, and a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea there is no rationale for the Irish government to even entertain participation in this piracy and provocation against a nuclear armed power. There is no UN mandate for this military mission. The “sanctions” this mission aims to enforce are not sanctions. They are unilateral coercive measures with no mandate from the UN. Under the terms of the Triple Lock which requires a UN mandate for defence forces deployments, Ireland cannot take part in this insanity.
Even more audacious was the announcement on September 1 that Ireland was working with other EU countries towards an EU-led mission in Lebanon that will replace the UNIFIL mission whose UN mandate expires in December. The government is saying that it would be a humanitarian crisis if there is not a replacement force to step in after the UN mission leaves. What they are omitting is the fact that any EU-led force in Lebanon would not be a peacekeeping force, only the UN has the authority to mandate one.
Since 2 March, over 4000 Lebanese have been killed by Israel and over a million displaced. Entire villages have been systematically detonated and wiped off the map in the South of Lebanon and the land occupied by Israel. Israel says that it will not leave this “security zone” until Hezbollah is disarmed.
The EU proposal is for a 3 year mission that will train and strengthen the Lebanese armed forces under the presidency of the pro-Western Joseph Aoun. What is most likely is that this EU-led force will serve to counter Hezbollah and provide cover as Israel cements its encroachments on Lebanese territory. At worst, this will see the EU taking sides in what may amount to a civil war.
European powers have colluded in genocide carried out against the Palestinians by the zionist state by providing arms, or allowing their territory and airspace to be used to aid in the commission of genocide. The EU tells us that Russia is a menace that must be countered by all means necessary – hundreds of billions of Euros to keep the war going in Ukraine, endless sanctions that have only backfired to create a cost of living and fuel crisis. Yet the EU stands with Israel up to and past the point of genocide. The EU won’t even halt the EU-Israel association agreement that has an explicit article that states the partnership is conditional on Israel’s respect for human rights. Are these the forces that should be trusted to be a good faith broker in Lebanon?
Micheal Martin is using this ill-defined mission as an example of why he wants to get rid of the Triple Lock. He says Ireland can’t help Lebanon because of the straight-jacket imposed by this protection on our neutrality. In their rush to please the military hawks in the EU and NATO the government keeps exposing the types of missions we would get involved in once the triple lock is gone.
We had the government lamenting the end of the UN mandate for Operation Irini earlier this year, when neither they nor the media were honest about the fact that the reason the UN mandate was not pursued by the EU was that the mission was being repurposed to hunt Russian commercial vessels in the Mediterranean. It has since boarded at least six vessels in a highly escalatory move by the EU. And now the Irish government is in talks to join the British-led version of this in the North seas?
These cases are proof positive we need the Triple Lock. The government cannot even tell the truth about what the missions are about. No one knows what the Lebanon one will look like but the signs do not bode well and they are gung ho for it. These people cannot be trusted to make these decisions. They are talking about sending our working class sons and daughters off to give their lives in EU and NATO orchestrated missions for the interests of Western imperialism as global conflict ratchets up. The Defence (Amendment) Bill 2026 that will replace the Triple Lock if it goes will allow the Government ministers to send up to 100 defence forces to any illegal war-fighting mission in the world without even a vote on the floor of the Dáil.
There is more democracy and transparency in the UN Security Council voting system than the mechanism FF/FG want to establish. But what do these middle-managers of capitalist business affairs care about democracy? There is no democratic mandate to scrap the Triple Lock, there is only an order from their masters in Washington, London, and Brussels.
The stakes could not be higher. If the Triple Lock is scrapped we are one step closer to Ireland becoming a 32 county NATO outpost. People of military age in Ireland will be sent to fight and die in imperialist wars for the axis of genocide. Our public services and infrastructure gutted to meet NATOs 5% military spending demand.
We must fight to save the Triple Lock, to save the last protection stopping us becoming fully integrated into the US-led imperialist war machine. We must organise to take back power from the capitalist class whose interest is advanced at every turn by the immiseration and early death of the working people of Ireland.
