Defence Cheats Cheat Us All

The inevitable death of Irish neutrality

Irish Defence Forces at MILEX 2025, a large-scale EU military exercise in Hungary.

The sun was beating down on our uniformed platoon as we fanned out on the dry grass of a soccer pitch in the early 2010s. At that point, every one of us had seen extensive action in Rust and Afghan and conversations often centred on no-scoping, boosting, and getting nukes as we huddled in to watch tinny-sounding clips off Samsung Galaxys. ‘leon jumps in the liffey for 50 Euro’ and ‘fuck you deputy stag’ were new out — the dark satanic mill of short-form video had yet to begin its all-pervasive churn. Another clip circulating around the time was of an interviewer going up to random people with a mic and asking them, “Would you die for Ireland?”. Back then, I had no idea this was from a 2003 short film by John Byrne; though naturally, my classmates and I all emphatically agreed, probably through mouthfuls of Chickatees, that we would all die for Ireland, no questions asked. Byrne’s film presented a cross-section of Irish patriotism, with some jaded pedestrians saying no or taking their time to articulate criticisms of the state, but most entertaining are the heroic 2003 hardmen firing back an instant, gung-ho ‘yeah’. Even former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern weighed in with a signature mumbling non-answer, despite being the leader of the country and the only person who, 110%, should be willing to die for it.

The current generation of Irish children has had the question answered for them: They will die for Ireland, or any number of other countries, if policymakers — and their cortège of lobbyists — decide they should. The triple lock, Ireland’s safeguard against war, is being dismantled, and the process of silently smothering our neutrality has begun in earnest.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Reading the hawkish op-eds that are excreted almost daily by the uniparty’s press, you would be forgiven for thinking Ireland is nestled somewhere high in the Caucasus or on the shores of the Baltic. The paternalistic tone normally used to extoll the virtues of living at home with your parents or dunk on Sinn Fein, is now being rolled out to demand we stop our “freeloading” and kill or be killed like grown-ups.

In their eyes, sensible Ireland must integrate with the big kids in NATO or the EU, and of course, conveniently get in on the ground floor of the coming European military-industrial complex, if it wants to survive the coming danger. While not without some truth, this narrative conflates having a functional military with ditching our neutrality. The world is indeed becoming more dangerous; the load-bearing wall of American protection around Europe is being sledgehammered by an unprecedentedly antagonistic and Russophile Whitehouse. Beyond the war currently lighting up the Steppe, the Balkans are fracturing, Turkey and Israel are hungrily eying the carcass of Assad’s Syria, China is flexing its fleet of invasion barges, and African armies are on the march from Khartoum to Kivu. In this environment, it's reasonable to say that we need the ability to safeguard our shipping, patrol our extensive territorial waters, and protect the undersea cables that run beneath them, but that's not what’s being asked of us.

Maintaining a defence force is fine, we already have one which we’ve quite happily neglected and woefully underfunded for decades. In fact, Ireland spends the least on defense in the EU, approximately 0.24% of its GDP— a figure rendered meaningless by the warp speed tax avoidance system that inflates it — and is largely incapable of fighting a conventional war at any scale. We lack equipment such as tanks or the MLRS seen in other European militaries, and membership of the Defence Forces has declined to around 7,000 due to low pay, insufficient pensions, and poor working conditions. Our navy numbers 6 ships, primarily designed to protect our fisheries. Ultimately, some work needs to be done. To shoo away hostile vessels, we need some of our own. To counter the units of Spetznaz supposedly hell-bent on dinghying up the Shannon to rename our cities Dublinsk or Limerickgrad, we need a larger, better-equipped military, and that’s fine.

Instead of simply investing in our crap army though, the real target is our non-proliferation of weapons, we will be nudged into the coming rearmament feeding frenzy. As the West's divorce is finalised, Europe’s dormant military-industrial power will sputter back into life. Firms like Rheinmetall, Thales, and Leonardo have already seen their stock prices skyrocket. This comes as an increasingly unreliable US cozies up to the Kremlin, attempting to drag Ukraine to a suspiciously butchers-block-like negotiating table. All the while, the EU scrambles to keep Kiev in shells, despite buying more Russian fossil fuel in 2024 than it gives in aid to Ukraine. It’s essential to recognise this as the opening moves of a deadly and cynical dance between Brussels, Washington, Beijing, and Moscow, not a struggle between good and evil, and we should absolutely not be getting involved.

Assertions by liberal media-dorks that we’re somehow detracting from some wider European security by being neutral are simply a militarist guilt trip. Even at twice or three times its current size, the Defence Forces would have a negligible impact in a conflict like Ukraine. No doubt, Dublin intends to find its niche in the battle-gizmo sector, producing drones, spyware, or other implements of war that befit an economy geared toward tech. If all goes to plan, people will soon be able to watch footage of terrified grunts getting skulled with FPV drones made in Clare, and enemy losses will be a KPI — the future is bright.

Additionally, the notion that Irish soldiers are somehow obliged to march into the meatgrinder, which sees thousands die daily, is a ghoulish lie propagated by hackneyed columnists who won't have to fight for anything except parking near Donnybrook Fair. It would be moronic to sour on our hard-won neutrality because some pencil pushers in Brussels called us names. However, it’s likely already too late; Official Ireland will silently deconstruct our neutrality for money and tell us it’s only fair.

War is coming; we don’t know who it will be against yet, and it doesn’t really matter anyway. Optimism about the responsible or ethical use of Europe’s new arsenal is idiotically naive. The drones and shells pumped out of European factories might never be used on Russian conscripts, but they’re just as effective against Gazan paramedics, Congolese villagers, or anyone else unlucky enough to be marked for annihilation by future clients. After all, there’s no point leaving them gathering dust in some arms dump. The cutting-edge spyware we develop will be tested against enemies you didn’t even know you had; muslims, commies, protestors, nationalists, journalists, and subversives of every stripe will be watched, and there will be no distinction between an anti-war protester and a Russian saboteur. The press, and in turn a growing swathe of the public, will cheer excitedly as Europe once more laces up the jackboot and the money rolls in. The tone will be perpetually urgent and McCarthyist, and a lot of people will become very wealthy.

Ultimately, Ireland, a country that struggles to build houses and hospitals here, will not exonerate itself by destroying them elsewhere. The vast majority of Irish people support neutrality and rightly so. After centuries of playing cannon fodder in another nation’s wars, we’ve earned our right to peace. Besides, why should Ireland’s young go and die for a government slowly stripping them of their future? To quote Byrne’s film “Die for Ireland? I think I already have.” Getting rid of our neutrality means we become a cog in this European war machine, a link in a supply chain, and ultimately a target. When I think back to my mates and me expressing how we’d die for Ireland on the spot, it was not really on the cards for any of us, unless you count blacking out in a field. Someone should put the question to Michaél Martin and see if he wriggles like Bertie, because for the current generation of schoolboys, “yes” might leave them dead in some lonely foxhole.

The world is going to get darker and more dangerous; there is no turning back — this is about keeping the head. Don’t buy the fearmongering; this is an economic exercise, a diversification of Dublin’s portfolio. Die for Ireland if you have to, but whatever you do, don’t die for the GDP.