Irish neutrality: A tiny Riverdance of angels dancing on the head of a Fáinne pin

Language sometimes gets in the way of thought. This is probably the case when “neutrality”, “tradition” and “Irish” appear in close proximity. It is a rather combustible combination – as evidenced by President Michael D Higgins’s comments to the Business Post last Sunday that talk of joining Nato is “the fire that people are playing with”. He also seemed to dismiss in advance the Government’s launch this week of its Consultative Forum on International Security Policy as “people playing parlour games”.

Untypically, Higgins also seemed personally disrespectful to its chair, the distinguished Irish political scientist Louise Richardson, when he referred to her as “a person with a very large DBE – Dame of the British Empire”, a characterisation he later apologised for.

These unusually barbed remarks were made in defence of what the president called Ireland’s “long-running tradition” of neutrality. That his normally very assured feel for the right tone deserted him on this occasion is a warning about the way this whole subject can be mired in linguistic confusion.

This is all the more obvious because, in fact, the president’s remarks were broadly in tune with public opinion. Asked in last week’s Irish Times poll whether they support Ireland’s “current model of military neutrality”, which the Government defines as remaining outside military alliances, 61 per cent said yes. Moreover, only a little more than half of those who do want the policy to change supported Ireland joining Nato. There is no current prospect of any democratic mandate for doing so.

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[ Did President Michael D Higgins cross a line with his neutrality remarks? You bet he did ]

That could change if, say, Russia were to attack subsea cables in Irish waters – a possibility that is not unimaginable if the war in Ukraine continues to escalate. But as things stand, “parlour games” is a pretty good description of some of the debate.

In 2002, after the Nice Treaty was rejected in a referendum – partly because of fears that it would lead to Ireland entering an EU defence pact – the then government issued what were called the Seville Declarations. They twice referred to our “traditional policy of military neutrality”.

That seems clear enough. Yet, beneath the surface of this political clarity, there are murky depths of uncertain meaning. If we had a submarine to dive down into those dark fathoms (which we don’t because we don’t have a navy), we would find a head-wrecking theological conundrum: Ireland evokes a tradition of neutrality but it has never practised traditional neutrality.

For – and here you may hear a tiny Riverdance of angels on the head of a Fáinne pin – our traditional policy of military neutrality must not be confused with everyone else’s understanding of the term.

[ Neutrality debates and the President: What is behind Michael D Higgins’s criticism? ]

What everyone else understands by military neutrality is that a country that adopts it invests heavily in its own defence forces so that it can resist threats without relying on alliances. And that it does not allow any foreign military forces on its national territory.

We don’t do the first of these and we do permit the second.

We have no land, sea or air forces capable of deterring, let alone repelling, any serious attack by a foreign power. We have a “naval service” rather than a navy and an “air corps” rather than an air force. And we have permitted the transit during wartime of huge numbers of US troops through Shannon Airport on their way to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Moreover, we actually have an understanding with another foreign power – the UK – that its air force will monitor and challenge Russian jets entering our territory.

So we have our very own, bespoke, hand-woven, one-of-a-kind neutrality. We use a word that usually means something quite different to signify a policy it does not really describe.

Amusingly, even Sinn Féin supporters are happy to let the Brits defend our free, Gaelic airspace. In the Irish Times poll, a mere 17 per cent of them professed themselves unhappy with this convenient arrangement.

[ Forum on security policy criticised as ‘fool’s mission’ by neutrality campaigners ]

Also unclear is what, in real life, are the foreign policy implications of our refusal to join military alliances. Or to put the question more concretely, when was the last time Ireland really broke with the EU and “the West” on a question of war and peace? That would surely be during the Falklands crisis in 1982.

At that time, the EU had arrived at a common position: supporting Britain and imposing sanctions on Argentina. Ireland, under Charles Haughey, suddenly broke ranks, withdrew from the sanctions policy and declared its neutrality on the conflict. This infuriated Margaret Thatcher, and severely damaged Anglo-Irish relations.

I don’t think most historians see this episode as an example of the principle of neutrality in action. It was probably more a case of Haughey seeking to match Thatcher’s gunboat diplomacy with his own showboat diplomacy.

But even if we view it benignly, is it not telling that we have not repeated it in 40 years? In practice, Ireland is too much part of the West to stand apart from it.

Planning for a vote that would be sure to fail would be a waste of time and money and a distraction from the discussion we do need to have

So how do we get to some honest consistency on all of this? Only by starting with clarity about what we are not trying to do, which is preparing the ground for Ireland joining a military alliance.

Even before we get to issues of principle, there are two obvious reasons to rule that out now. The first is that, even if it was a good idea, we simply don’t have the capacity. It’s like discussing whether and when you should join the Bolshoi Ballet when you can’t even do the Chicken Dance at a wedding.

The second is that joining an alliance would require a referendum and, unless something very dramatic happens in our territorial waters, we can feck that for a game of soldiers. Planning for a vote that would be sure to fail would be a waste of time and money and a distraction from the discussion we do need to have.

That discussion is not about Nato or an EU army. It’s about whether we want to have the capacity, for example, to patrol our vast, and increasingly important, territorial waters. It’s about how we define Ireland’s “security” in the age of climate chaos, mass migration and the rise of authoritarianism.

And in fact the president, in that interview, had some very important things to say about these questions. He is quite right to suggest that we should pay attention to how they are being framed – and right to suggest that investment in our military cannot be separated from the need for urgent and thorough reform of its sexist culture.

He was right, too, that we cannot afford to “drift” along in dangerous waters without having a well-built craft and a clear set of principles by which to navigate.

It is pretty obvious where the Irish people don’t want to go – but appealing to a shifty notion of tradition is not much use in a radically changing world.