The Consultative Forum on International Security Policy announced by the Minister for Defence Micheál Martin is a welcome and necessary initiative. It will examine and discuss security threats faced by the State and how they are linked to foreign and defence policies, and is expected to make recommendations to the Government. It is intended to stimulate an honest and informed discussion. It deserves widespread support.
Martin set the context for the initiative by referring to Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine. This bringing of war to the European Continent profoundly affects “Ireland’s efforts to protect the rules-based international order, through peacekeeping and crisis management, disarmament and non-proliferation, international humanitarian law, and conflict prevention and peacebuilding as well as allowing for a discussion on Ireland’s policy of military neutrality”, as he put it. An informed discussion must take account of how comparable neutral small states like Finland and Sweden (though not Austria, Switzerland and Malta) have decided to join the Nato alliance in response to Russia’s invasion.
Ireland’s political and public discussion of these increasingly pressing issues has been hesitant, fitful, ill-informed and indecisive in recent years. Blame for this lies largely at senior political and stakeholder levels. An over-cautious approach drives it, arising from initial defeats of EU referendums and the need to reassure an anxious public in subsequent ratification campaigns that Irish sovereignty over military neutrality was not compromised by closer integration. That is the origin of the “triple lock” mechanism providing that military action by the State requires decisions by the Cabinet, the Dáil and also approval by the UN Security Council. Subsequent experience of the financial crash, the efforts to recover from it and then dealing with the Brexit crisis consumed political energy in those years.
In fact these relatively successful achievements set the context in which this review of the State’s security policies is needed. Ireland’s economic recovery from the crash and its effective internationalisation of the response to Brexit underline our interdependence with European and transatlantic partners and the security vulnerabilities we share with them. Many of the world’s strongest international technological and pharmaceutical companies are active here and contribute hugely to Ireland’s prosperity, while our strong political links to global centres of power interest their adversaries.
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Ireland is militarily but not politically neutral and the changing mix of values and interests deserves regular review and renewal. That is the task of the forum. It should be the start of a comprehensive updating of security requirements in line with Ireland’s international positioning.