It could have gone so much worse, Micheál Martin’s White House encounter with Donald Trump. Martin, the consummate diplomat, sat politely and did not bring up the president’s plan to turn the Gaza Strip into a Mar-a-Lago-en-Levant. He was shrewd to point out that Irish companies were the biggest international customers of Boeing, too. Trump does not want to “hurt” Ireland, the US president concluded – which sounded like a threat more than a promise – but he does want the pharmaceuticals arrangement to be “fair”. Martin took it all in a perfectly statesmanlike manner.
It is nice, as Robert Shrimsley wrote of Keir Starmer after the British prime minister’s meeting with Trump the previous week, “to have a premier who does not act like a gibbon on the world stage”. (Starmer may be prosaic and uninspiring but he is, at least, serious.) And so, in an immediate and narrow sense Martin did the right thing – fly under the radar, trade on Ireland’s good-vibes reputation, avoid triggering the capricious president at all costs. But there is a nagging feeling that this competent diplomatic window-dressing masks a deeper problem: the world of the Irish establishment’s fantasies does not exist, and their accompanying geopolitical strategy is well past its expiry date.
That is, at least, the view from London’s observers (“It’s time Ireland started to pay for its defence,” read one telling headline in the Times of London on Tuesday). While Germany redraws its fiscal rules to accommodate a hike in defence spending, and Britain slashes foreign aid to fund a historic increase to their own defence budget (2.5 per cent by 2027, 3 per cent by the next parliament), Ireland’s recent triple-lock debate looks small and self-important. Under the planned new arrangement there would be no need for Ireland to have UN approval to deploy peacekeeping forces, and no need to seek sign-off from the Dáil to deploy up to 50 troops. Europe can sleep soundly.
While Ireland inconsequentially tinkers at its own margins, there is plenty of anxious hand-wringing about Britain and Europe more generally on matters of defence: how prepared are they to rearm, really? Is 2.5 per cent enough money for Starmer to lead from the front against a rapacious Vladimir Putin? Who is actually willing to send troops to the Eastern frontier? At what point will these newly minted efforts to honourably defend the continent lose the public’s interest? Can Europe, vexed for some time now by low growth, afford all of this without abandoning several of its other priorities?
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All good questions. Meanwhile, a significant strategic outpost on the periphery of the continent, an island surrounded by 75 per cent of all transatlantic undersea cables, is entirely unable to defend itself, let alone give up its fealty to neutrality and step in to help defend others. Simon Harris said earlier this month: “We do also need to spend more on defence because actually when you are militarily neutral, you still have an obligation to your own people, to your own country, you still have an obligation to protect your own seas and your own skies ... We are in an era now of significant investment in defence ... but all of that very much aligned with military neutrality” – a statement that sounded quite America (or rather, Ireland) First.
Aside from the very material concerns that Ireland does not have the military capabilities to defend either itself or the 16 per cent of EU territorial waters surrounding it, there are optics to think about. And the grandiose and moralising statements about military spending from our President don’t help the minor public perception crisis Ireland has drawn up for itself. Forced to think about it, if I were the head of state of a country with no defence capacity, entirely reliant on the goodwill of my neighbours, and I was aware of an attritional war happening on my continent’s opposite frontier, I would not personally denounce Nato’s call for increased defence spending as “appalling”. But perhaps that’s just me.
There is an irony here. Ireland’s stock has fallen in Europe. And the country’s tax arrangements are of far greater concern to the administrators in Brussels than our military status. If Ireland refuses to come to Europe’s side in a time of crisis I am sure it won’t make anyone here particularly popular. Spending some of Ireland’s wealth – accrued by unfair and ill-begotten means, many Europeans believe – on mutual defence could patch over and even delay some rather awkward tax conversations awaiting us down the line. For the first time Ireland can make a serious contribution. It’ll get harder and harder to make the case for not doing so.
The universe where Ireland can bask in its peacenik status is gone. And the soapboxes of Michael D Higgins’s dreams are not just less worthy contributions from a leftist tradition, they are a liability. Europe might not have thought through exactly how it plans to pay to defend itself under this new world order, but Ireland has barely even admitted to itself that it might one day have to.
