Ireland has been having the wrong neutrality debate

In early 2018 Strava published a “global heat map” showing all the places in the world where users of smartwatches who used its GPS-based fitness app had run, walked or cycled over the previous two years.

As you would expect, the US, Europe and the world’s richer countries lit up. In stark contrast the developing world was mostly in darkness.

But sharp-eyed observers noticed a few strange oasis-like clusters of heat in the Strava deserts that extended across swathes of Africa and the Middle East. On closer inspection, they showed intense daily activity in small areas of countries wracked by war such as Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia and Sudan.

What the map appeared to be tracking – inadvertently – was the movements of soldiers at US military bases in locations that did not show up on any map. In other words, a widely available fitness tracking app had disclosed highly sensitive information that had the potential to compromise military operations.

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‘An offhand comment’: Louise Richardson on the President’s broadside in the neutrality debate

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At the Government’s Consultative Forum on International Security Policy in late June, one of the speakers, cybersecurity expert Robert McArdle of Trend Micro, made an observation about the speed of technological advances.

“If you chart out the generational changes in technology, starting with the printing press, the typewriter, the internet, email and so on. If you graph them all out, it gets exponentially faster each time. The time between these big generational shifts of technology gets shorter and shorter.

[ Neutrality debate: Assuming Ireland’s national security policy is morally superior is self-delusional ]

“No matter how fast you think you are running to stay in advance of it, it’s never fast enough,” he said.

He added: “Most of [the changes] make our lives better but some have scary scenarios.”

The forum was one of the better exercises of democracy in action that Ireland has had in recent years; it had no preordained outcome and, unlike a Citizens’ Assembly, was open to public scrutiny.

It was also notable for having been precondemned by President Michael D Higgins, who voiced criticisms (for which he later apologised) of its chair Louise Richardson and expressed his fear of Ireland’s “drift” away from neutrality. That was not the tenor of discussions at the event.

If the President and others believed the forum was a means for shunting Ireland into Nato, they were wrong. It was about trying to understand the threat a country like Ireland might face in a connected, complicated and volatile world.

Ireland is no longer peripheral. The State will need to co-operate with others in defending critical infrastructure here

The challenge presented by the forum was: how do you define neutrality when threats originate not only from conventional armies, but also from hacktivists and from programmes made autonomous by artificial intelligence and by machine learning?

For decades, Ireland’s policy of neutrality was easy to get your head around. Ireland was a small country with no axe to grind. It did not get involved in the conflicts of bigger states.

Unlike other neutral countries, we maintained a small defence force. It meant if we were attacked, we would be quickly over-run. That wasn’t the point. We projected a profile to the world of a country that stayed above the fray. We were honest brokers. We didn’t attack. Ergo, we weren’t attacked. That view became the settled one. And it retains wide support from the public. That said, I suspect most people have not really thought too deeply about what neutrality means in the context of rapid change.

In the connected world we live in, Ireland faces threats we never envisaged, both from state and non-state actors. The realpolitik is that our Republic is no longer a minor (vaguely isolationist) state on the periphery of Europe.

The National Cyber Risk Assessment published report in June starkly pointed out certain realities: “The technological base of Irish society has developed significantly; not only is the State now home to a large proportion of Europe’s data, and the European headquarters of a number of the world’s largest technology firms, but also the vast majority of the critical services in the State are wholly or partially dependent on technology, in both the information system and industrial control system realms.

“An outage or incident affecting this critical technology could therefore have immediate disruptive effects on the critical services they underpin across the State, the EU or even globally.”

The immediate example was the devastating ransomware attack on the HSE in 2021. We see vulnerability too when sensitive information is not secured, or is compromised through human error, as happened with the leak of the details of more than 10,000 PSNI personnel this week.

[ How the HSE cyber attack changed the face of online crime globally ]

The war in Ukraine has been ongoing for almost 18 months. But a parallel cyberwar has being going on for years. On the eve of the war Russia mounted a cyberattack on the Viasat network, which disabled and “wiped out” internet services to Ukrainian households. That attack also stopped the turbines of a huge component of Germany’s wind power.

We may see ourselves as neutral but Russia now regards us as an enemy. Ireland was one of 21 embassies targeted by Russian intelligence hackers in Kyiv. Ireland is no longer peripheral. The State will need to co-operate with others in defending critical infrastructure here.

A contributor to the security forum, Brigadier General Seán White, observed that raid software development in the Ukraine conflict brings new threats on a daily basis: “Cyberattacks will become a ubiquitous and routine feature [of conflict] in future.”

This week’s column isn’t about the merits and demerits of neutrality; it’s about how the locus of the debate has changed. I would argue that framing our neutrality wholly in terms of joining Nato has become an ossified trope. It’s not where it is at any more.