The question of Irish neutrality has once again burst to the fore with the government proposing a new bill that would remove the Triple Lock.
This is a scandalous, calculated effort to bring Ireland in line with the militaristic frenzy sweeping Europe in light of the tectonic shifts taking place in relations between the various imperialist powers on the world stage. With Trump at the helm, the US is pulling out of Europe to focus on defending its interests elsewhere, which will put countries such as Ireland under increased pressure to choose a side.
Alongside this new attempt to remove the Triple Lock, the government is promising to more than double Irish military spending in coming years. A workers’ republic could use these resources to address the pressing issues facing workers and youth, but instead they are being put towards a new arms race that benefits nobody except the imperialists and the merchants of death reaping the profits of the arms industry.
What’s more, Tánaiste and Minister for Defence Simon Harris insists that pushing through a highly unpopular piece of legislation that could decide whether Irish workers are sent to die in a foreign country is “democracy in action”, as he proclaimed during a Dáil debate in February.
Harris leads a party that scraped by with 20 percent of the vote in an election with historically low turnout. In the run-up to last year’s general elections, he expressed his opposition to common European borrowing for defence, citing that “there are so many projects that Europe now needs to fund”. Now that he’s in power, Harris has flip-flopped on the question of militarism and he has the gall to preach about democracy!
In fact, every time the Irish ruling class has alluded to moving “beyond neutrality”, they have come up against the backlash of Irish workers and youth, for whom neutrality signifies a hatred of imperialism and the Triple Lock in particular epitomises their mistrust of Western military alliances and of the Dáil in resisting the imperialists’ pressure. Indeed, a poll conducted in January found that 75 percent of Irish people support the current policies on neutrality.
It is abundantly clear that scrapping the Triple Lock has nothing to do with democracy and everything to do with appeasing the foreign imperialist interests that the Irish ruling class is slavishly beholden to.
Triple Lock
The Triple Lock demands that any deployment of more than a dozen Irish troops must have approval from the Government, the Dáil and the UN Security Council, a body which contains five permanent members: the US, UK, France, China and Russia. It is precisely this final condition that irks the Irish ruling class and embarrasses them in front of their imperialist masters.
The rise of China and Russia as imperialist powers contending with the US and Europe on a global scale means that the UN security council can no longer be trusted to do the bidding of Western imperialism. Indeed, it has not approved a single ‘peacekeeping’ mission since 2014.
Therefore, in order to keep on playing the role of faithful lapdogs of the Western imperialists, the Irish ruling class is now forced to abandon the convenient fig-leaf of UN approvals. So that everything stays the same in a changing world, the Triple Lock has to go – so goes their thinking.
But the re-inauguration of Donald Trump and the ensuing rift between the US and Europe has further complicated the situation for the Irish ruling class, which now seems more determined than ever to push forward.
Trump Against Europe
Ireland finds itself lodged between the two millstones of European and American imperialism. These are increasingly resembling two opposing camps on the world stage.
At a February defence summit in Brussels, Trump’s Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth made it clear that the US is done footing the bill for European defence. The warmongers across Europe are now scrambling to adjust to the new state of affairs, each racing to outdo the other in their commitments to increase military spending.
As for Ireland, should Trump’s proposed tariffs and tax reform lead to a flight of US capital, the Irish ruling class will have to huddle under the wing of its European and British masters to avoid being left out in the cold tundra of the looming world economic slump.
The task before the Fine Gael-Fianna Fáil 2.0 government is set. To prove themselves as reliable allies for Europe in the coming storm, they must increase their military spending and make it clear that Ireland’s ‘neutrality’ won’t prevent it from playing its part in the defence of European imperialism. This is spelled out plainly in a hawkish opinion piece in the Irish Times, urging the government to hurry up already on increasing defence spending and abandoning any pretence at neutrality:
“It is now time to face up to our responsibilities and rapidly develop a coherent defence policy for this State no matter what it costs […] While the military aid Ireland could offer in the event of an invasion of an EU state would be negligible, a refusal to come to the aid of a fellow member state would alter our relationship with the union in a fundamental fashion. [All italics are ours.]”
Of course, it is nothing short of lunacy to think that anyone is going to invade an EU member state any time soon. The real reason for the military build-up across Europe is for the ruling classes of the region to have a force with which to defend the interests of European imperialism abroad in the absence of US assistance.
Healthcare not Warfare!
Simon Harris for his part is eager to grant the European imperialists their wish. As a first step, he has promised to rename the Irish Naval Service and Air Corps to the Navy and Air Force respectively. But it’s obvious that presenting Ireland to its European allies as a country serious about European militarism is not as simple as painting over the emblem on the side of our ancient military jets and ships.
To that end, Harris has expressed his desire to increase Irish defence spending from its record high 2025 level of €1.35 billion to €3 billion! This would see defence spending increase threefold from its level in 2017 and it comes at a time when a mere €2.157 billion in the budget is allocated for the construction of homes. Furthermore, with the ink still fresh on his Triple Lock bill, Harris has even suggested that Ireland should participate in a European ‘peacekeeping’ mission in Ukraine!
But regardless of whether Irish troops are deployed to Ukraine or anywhere else in coming years, the government’s rush to join Europe’s militaristic frenzy will lead to Irish people dying. Irish people will die on hospital waiting lists and will freeze to death sleeping rough while money that could be spent addressing the historic crises in healthcare and housing will instead be spent on the military.
The workers and young people of Ireland don’t need new fighter jets and navy ships. They need homes, a functional health service, school spaces for their children and decent jobs. And they want Ireland to have nothing to do with the kind of great power games that subjugated this country for centuries and that brutally oppress people across the world to this day. The same British and German ruling classes that Harris and Martin are keen to impress with Irish military ‘might’ are the ones who sent billions in military aid to Israel to facilitate the mass slaughter of Palestinians.
The Irish government’s blatant disregard for maintaining even the illusion of neutrality speaks to the gaping chasm that exists between the priorities of the ruling class and the interests of ordinary people. Only by taking power into its own hands through a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system can the Irish working class forge its own destiny, kick the imperialists out of Ireland and finally establish a 32-counties socialist republic!
