Protesters think silly little Ireland can’t stay sober around sexy, scheming Nato

It’s the certainty that dazzles, the easy slogans purporting to answer a question that no one asked.

Has anyone wielding any political authority in this country actually demanded a Yes to Nato? If anything, the traffic has been all the other way. On Monday, while Taoiseach Leo Varadkar was inside Dublin Castle listing all the reasons why being outside Nato is an excellent thing, two protesters interrupted him to peddle Kremlin talking points characterising Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression as a Joe Biden “proxy war”.

Even Putin’s butcher, Yevgeny Prigozhin, doesn’t pretend to swallow that nonsense any more. In a pre-mutiny video tirade last Friday he stated flatly that “the decision [to invade Ukraine] had nothing to do with ‘denazification’ or ‘demilitarisation’, or an imminent Nato attack on Russia ...”

Prigozhin is hardly a reliable narrator, but no one could accuse him of being in the pay of Nato either. What he says rings true.

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At the heart of protesters’ fears is the notion that this country can’t be trusted to stay sober in the presence of big, sexy, scheming Nato heads. That some day silly little Ireland will wake up to discover they got us drunk and stole our honour. Are we really that stupid?

The issue of Irish Nato membership has never once been discussed at headquarters over his 20 years as Nato’s director of security policy and partnerships, James Mackey told the Government’s Consultative Forum on Monday. It never came up. That’s because Ireland is a sovereign, independent nation that chooses its own security policy under the UN Charter, said Mackey.

Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he.

But even if Nato is nursing secret plans for us, that surely makes it all the more imperative that we inform ourselves in different forums without creating forcefields of anger and provocation. For a country that often accuses others of exceptionalism, we do pretty well at making exceptions of ourselves.

Prof Andrew Cottey noted here that supporters often assume that neutrality is a morally superior policy. But those who believe that should pause to consider Ukraine, he said. If the West had not agreed to arm Ukraine, Russia would now control it, the Ukrainian leadership would be imprisoned or executed and President Putin would be imposing a brutal dictatorship on the country.

How many doses of whataboutery would it take to make us feel superior in that event?

Many will disagree with Cottey, but not as many as the noise suggests. Under four in 10 are opposed to joining Nato, according to the latest Business Post/Red C poll. But rather surprisingly, more than three in 10 support the idea. That’s a remarkably tight result for a country where no political party is advocating for membership and any other position is deemed a heresy. More pertinently, it leaves 28 per cent who say they don’t know. In a more confident country, influential figures would be chivvying all of them towards expert forums, to listen carefully, to make up their own minds and have their confident say in a referendum.

Their first lesson probably would be that Ireland is delusional if it thinks Nato would accept us with our current risible defence capabilities. The second would be that an accident of geography is what allows us the luxury of making lofty, angry speeches about more vulnerable countries’ defence policies. Take Finland, a Eurozone republic like our own, which in successive opinion polls fiercely opposed Nato membership, but was finally propelled into it this year by the psychopathic leadership of its neighbour, with whom it shares a 1,340km border.

We fancy we might have something in common with Finland, with its population not much bigger than ours and the fact that it was colonised for over 600 years by various neighbours – before finally transforming itself from one of the poorest corners of Europe into one of the richest, most contented countries in the world.

Apart from that long history of occupation and a bloody Civil War, there was the heroic fight against Soviet occupation in the 1939 Winter War, after which it was obliged to pay $226,500,000 war reparations in gold – via 346,000 railroad car loads – to the Soviet Union, and cede 10 per cent of its territory. It is evidence of the complexity of its situation that it subsequently uneasily allied itself with Nazi Germany in World War II. Six years ago on a visit to Finland, Putin praised the calibre of “political dialogue” between the two neighbours.

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Writing about a still non-aligned Finland a couple of years ago, I noted it had just ordered 64 new fighter jets costing €10 billion while continuing a policy of universal conscription under the constitution – and wondered what “neutral” Ireland’s response might be if our defence policy required us to have Finnish-level preparations for war.

We still don’t have an answer. Yet when the Red C pollsters asked whether people support Ireland’s reliance on Britain (a very large letter Nato member) to help patrol our seas and skies, nearly half said they were in favour and one quarter said they didn’t know.

Go figure.