Sir, – In your editorial, you write: "Ireland has common interests, interoperability challenges, and capabilities that could be developed with others. But Ireland, for reasons that are not clear, chooses not to engage." ("The Irish Times view on EU defence co-operation: a reluctant member, November 18th).
Might those unclear reasons be a political awareness that our people retain sufficient of their collective history of imperial warmongering and exploitation to have drawn the hard lesson that militarism is the disease rather than any viable solution to the tranche of global crises thundering down the tracks, and that flat earth nationalist tribalism has its useful limits in resisting imperial domination, and should not be pushed beyond those limits in the nuclear age?
I will leave it at that, as I suspect your editorial was a rhetorical spur to the continuation of the current lemming posturings so recently displayed in Glasgow, rather than an inquiry into why we do not join Pesco’s “most active participants”, France and Spain, with their “glorious” imperial histories and insatiably lucrative military/industrial complexes, and as such any contrary opinion will not see the light of day.
– Yours, etc,
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DAMIEN FLINTER,
Headford,
Co Galway.