The long-running campaign against a radio navigation mast in Co Clare because there might be defence implications to its construction has a rather surreal ring to it. Perhaps we can look forward to the League of Locksmiths being picketed by householders because by their endeavours they are making life needlessly difficult for burglars; and car-alarm dealers might look forward to protests from car-owners at difficulties being put in the way of car-thieves.
And I suppose it really is the case that very many people wish to live in a state that does not protect its western flank and the waters it commands, and who believe the very quality of defencelessness serves as a form of morally superior defence.
Ostrichology
There is a logic here, of a sort. It is based on the recondite science of ostrichlogy, which roughly declares that if you ignore a problem long enough, it will certainly go away without your doing anything at all about it. And ostrichology has a point - only provided that (a) the ostrich is surrounded by well-armed animals who do not wish to bite its bottom; and (b) they do not later present the bird with a full bill for their trouble.
Ireland has enjoyed this remarkable ostrichological indulgence since independence. It was in the interests of neither the US nor the UK, given the ocean of Anglosea which lies between them both, that an outside intruder should establish a base on the western perimeter of its European shores. To protect their joint hegemony over Anglosea, the two great maritime powers once invaded and ruled Iceland to prevent it falling into the hands of potential enemies.
The defence of Ireland was more easily negotiated, simply because of the contiguity of waters: the protection of the integrity of the United Kingdom implicitly involved the protection of neutral Ireland, not out of virtue - morality is as much a force in the formulation of defence policy as pig's blood is an ingredient to a bar mitzvah banquet - but out of raw self-interest.
There was quite a cute self-interest in Irish defence policy too. Recognising that the British and later the US would have to defend Ireland, our political masters decided to spare themselves the cost of a realistic defence policy. We bought a tank, and called it our armoured division, and we bought a biplane or two, and called it an air corps. A corvette became our battle-fleet, and a gun on wheels became our artillery. The result was what we are pleased to call our Defence Forces.
Now this made a great deal of sense when we were committed to creating the Gaelic Elysium, in which one day our elders would saunter through our rural hamlets dispensing bardic wisdom at every turn, and bare-footed urchins carolled to one another in mellifluous Irish. After all, it's very difficult to reconcile that fantasy world with a real world of guns and air forces and navies ploughing through the steepe Atlanticke (stet), especially when you consider the hideous cost of being grown up. Too dear, too horribly dear: let us instead dabble in the noble science of ostrichology.
Sense of virtue
One wonderful by-product of ostrichological dependency is the enormous sense of virtue it gives you. It enables you lift the word "defence" between a pair of tongs and treat it with the fastidious disdain one might reserve for the slave trade or human sacrifice. Ostrichology can turn the economic necessity of military vacuity into an ethical imperative. We are defenceless not because we are unable to afford to defend ourselves, but because we are above that kind of thing: this was a moral superiority made possible only by our address. The d-word could become a dirty word within our political vocabulary because our neighbours defended us.
It remains there now, even with the Government committee to Partnership for Peace. Our experiments in Albanian-type exclusion are well and truly over. The political consensus is overwhelmingly agreed on that. We are beginning to equip our defence forces with modern weapons systems, though to judge from the latest recruitment problems, future soldiers of the Republic more likely to speak Turkish or Berber than Irish or even English.
Yet the d-word can still arouse such concerns that many people objected to a radio navigation mast in Clare because it might have "defence" uses, as if this were tantamount to child abuse. Met Eireann even announced, almost with pride, that the weather buoys from which it receives its signals have no defence implications.
Two points: Point One, they have. Point Two, good.
Weather and war
There has never been a day since man reached for his club to steal another's land that weather wasn't an important factor in his decision when to leave his cave. Weather was why Irish meteorological reports were vital to the Allied conduct of the second World War. Weather governed the conduct of the air war in Kosovo. And the mysterious world of submarine warfare today depends on the intelligence gained from precisely the kind of oceanographic beacons that will soon be bouncing off our western shores.
It's rather sad that some people still subscribe to the anachronistic, pious cretinism that anything which might have a defence application is a fundamental immorality and is therefore beneath us. On the contrary, I hope that the Met Eireann weather beacons may double as sonar buoys, reporting all movements within the seas around us. Acknowledging weather isn't just a matter of sun-tans or harvests; it is part of being grown up.
Periscope dead ahead, skipper.