The fact that Ireland relies on the Royal Air Force (RAF) for its air defence should come as a surprise to no one. The obvious question being, who did we think was defending our skies? With the best will in the world there is little the Air Corps can do in this regard given the equipment at its disposal.
The Government has relied on legal advice that the agreement fell below the definition of a treaty, meaning it could remain secret, but in truth the air defence treaty-not-a-treaty has been an open secret for many years – since the early 1950s, it seems. But now that details of it are well and truly out in the open it will undoubtedly cause disquiet in certain areas. As a concept it does not sit well with some understandings of Irish nationalism.
There are good reasons to be cautious about the treaty-not-a-treaty with the UK. It may have served us well for the last 70 years but post-Brexit Britain is a very different kettle of fish to postwar Britain. It remains to be seen whether the duplicity, and at times outright stupidity, demonstrated by the ruling Conservative Party over the last decade or so is the exception or the rule. But on the face of it they are not the sort of people you would want to be relying on to defend your country, never mind their own.
[ Secret Anglo-Irish air defence agreement dates back to the Cold War eraOpens in new window ]
That said, throughout the entire Brexit shambles, there was no mention of the air defence treaty-not-a-treaty being revoked. (How you revoke a secret agreement with another sovereign state is another day’s work, but no doubt legal advice is involved.) Like some of the other peculiarities of our relationship with the UK, the logic – for both sides – of the air defence treaty-not-a-treaty trumps the spiteful instincts of even the pettiest of political minds.
Markets in Vienna or Christmas at The Shelbourne? 10 holiday escapes over the festive season
Ciara Mageean: ‘I just felt numb. It wasn’t even sadness, it was just emptiness’
Stealth sackings: why do employers fire staff for minor misdemeanours?
Carl and Gerty Cori: a Nobel Prizewinning husband and wife team
The Common Travel Area (CTA) is another example of this sort of pragmatism. In both cases there is a great deal of enlightened self-interest on the part of the British. Absent the air defence treaty-not-a-treaty, the RAF would be confronted with the difficult task of not being able to intercept potentially dangerous aircraft until they were halfway across the Irish Sea. In these days of hypersonic missiles that would be impossible.
There is a necessary realism in the Irish approach to the treaty-not-a-treaty. The fact is that if the UK was threatened British jets would enter Irish airspace, with or without our permission.
If the air defence treaty-not-a-treaty brouhaha tells us anything, it is something that we already know: our policy of military neutrality has run out of road
There are very significant economic advantages for Ireland in both the CTA and the air defence treaty-not-a-treaty. The benefits of the CTA are fairly obvious and you don’t have to look too hard to see the value in the treaty-not-a-treaty.
Equipping the Air Corps with fighter jets so that it can defend Irish airspace was mooted in the 2022 Report of the Commission on Defence Forces and promptly long-fingered. That has done little to stop various experts extrapolating as to the costs. One of the most frequently quoted is former head of the Air Corps Maj Gen Ralph James, who retired from the Defence Forces in 2015. He reckons Ireland would need 16 jet fighters with three crews each to implement a full air defence capability. He estimated it would cost about €1 billion in 2020. The 2023 defence budget is €1.174 billion.
James didn’t get into the nitty gritty of what sort of jets we should buy, but it is unlikely he was talking about the Eurofighters that the RAF has at its – and our – disposal. Spain ordered 20 Eurofighters last year at an estimated cost of €2 billion. We on the other hand are getting the benefit of the RAF’s planes – estimated to have cost £17.6 billion – for nothing. If Ireland does make some sort of financial contribution to the RAF – the planes cost almost €4,000 an hour to fly – it’s not visible in the defence budget.
The secret deal for the UK to protect Irish skies
It’s pretty clear that the most cost-effective and grown-up option for taking responsibility for defending our own airspace is some sort of formal co-operation between the Air Corps and the RAF, the details of which will exercise the imagination of armchair air marshals on both sides of the Irish Sea for years to come.
If the air defence treaty-not-a-treaty brouhaha tells us anything, it is something that we already know: our policy of military neutrality has run out of road. For myriad reasons underscored by the conflict in Ukraine, it is no longer a viable option. We cannot keep coming up with convoluted mechanisms to bypass in practice what is in theory Government policy. The latest such fiction being that Ireland’s support for the EU sending millions of artillery rounds to Ukraine is compatible with our neutrality.
There may have been good reasons for such subterfuge in the past but it makes fools of everybody for us to now pretend we don’t have an air defence treaty with Britain, and by extension Nato.