Neutrality, and the Things We Tell Ourselves

On Ireland's definition of defense neutrality, and what that means about the story we tell about ourselves

“Solo” by Steve Alpert

It’s been a while since I last wrote here, and as much as I’d love to blame the numerous late nights in my office (of which there have been way too many), I suspect it actually has more to do with the fact that I have just spent so much time trying to figure out how to discuss the topic of Ireland’s security and defense.

[A quick note: so as to not interrupt this essay, I have decided to declare my conflicts in the defense industry at the end — of which I have none, but since I work in the sector…]

My first instinct is to brain dump the extraordinarily long list of anger-inducing failures of the successive governments to create any institutional capacity in this regard and walk away.

I mean, I could simply argue that measured against any comparable European state, the Irish security posture is not only thin, but very nearly absent. Defense spending stands at roughly 0.3% of our GDP compared to the average of 2% for others, and 5% for some. Meanwhile, and connected, is that our Defence Forces have fallen below 8,000 personnel, against an official need of nearly 10,000, having lately touched their lowest strength in fifty years.

We are the only country in Europe to have no primary military radar. No fighter aircraft and no means of intercepting another aircraft in the air. No surface-to-air defense of any kind, at any range. So when an unidentified aircraft enters Irish-controlled airspace (yes, this happens!), it is the Royal Air Force that goes up to look at it, under an arrangement between London and Dublin that has never been published and that no Irish citizen has ever been permitted to read.

Of our naval vessels, perhaps four can be put to sea to watch an Exclusive Economic Zone of some 880,000 square kilometres – among the largest in Europe, which hosts the Atlantic landfall of the transatlantic cables that carry the data of a continent and upon which our entire FDI economy rests. We have no idea what the 245 Russian shadow fleet vessels were doing while they passed through our waters more than 450 times in the first seven months of last year.

What doesn’t help is that the intelligence function itself is split and diffused with an architecture that is unfit for purpose. There’s a domestic security service inside the national police, a separate military one inside the Department of Defence, and no foreign service at all. This creates a system-wide fragmentation that leaves us reliant on other states for what happens on and off our island, an arrangement that exists in no other European country.

Indeed, even for the most sensitive of that work, there is no oversight whatsoever by the Oireachtas or by anyone else. There is no published national security strategy, even after seven years of “drafting” one. Of the 60 or so frameworks that a modern European state has as a minimum baseline to function, Ireland has…. less than 5.

One analyst of Russia’s services has called Ireland a “soft target,” citing that our counterintelligence is “effectively nonexistent”, despite Ireland having one of the densest concentrations of internet and global economic assets in Europe. And yes, it shows! Russian military intelligence is believed to run operations from Irish soil against British and European targets, and those pesky Russian boats in our waters? They are constantly mapping where the transatlantic cables come ashore; and they do so knowing that we can see them, but are unable to do anything about it. Well, that is, other than calling the Royal Navy (His Majesty’s navy, the same Majesty we spent quite a long time trying to banish from our waters), which in the past has had to surface a submarine beside the vessel to send the Russians home (temporarily, before coming back again).

The temptation is to call this a failure of money, but you’ve read enough of my work now to probably realize it is not. We are a rich country! We can buy or create whatever security equipment or services we wish to have. So the next temptation then is to say, once again, that we are lacking the institutional machinery that turns FDI revenues into a serious security apparatus and suite of capabilities.

But I shan’t, because you and I already know this to be true.

In fact, this essay has been hard to write because I wanted to get past a discussion of the institutional failure and say something about neutrality itself. And neutrality is the one subject on which this country can generate infinite noise with very little rigor.

Are we neutral, or were we ever? Is neutrality a value or a habit, a principle or a façade? Is buying a radar “defense,” and so permitted, or the first step onto the slope that ends in NATO and other people’s wars? Is a cyber unit “security,” which sounds civilian and safe, or “defense,” which sounds martial and suspect. And what, while we are on the topic, is the difference between them? Is a drone that watches a cable defensive or offensive; is a satellite “dual-use”; is a data centre critical infrastructure or merely commerce, and does guarding it commit us to something we never agreed to? Does Article 42.7 oblige us to die for Estonia, and did we accidentally sign that without reading it? And over all of it, carried through the argument, is the Triple Lock; the mechanism by which Ireland handed a veto over the deployment of its own soldiers to the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, Russia among them, so that Moscow may help decide where an Irish peacekeeper is allowed to stand. Which the Government now moves to abolish; as the President calls the core of our neutrality and wants put to a referendum. A referendum which one half of the country mourns as a red-line limit and the other derides as a Russian veto we volunteered for, and on whose plain meaning I have not found two people to agree on.

Hello? Are you still here? Are you dizzy yet? Do any of the adults in the room actually know any of this? Are there adults in the room? The discussion around this is like pulling a complex thread (or pulling teeth); in that the answers to all of the questions above are probably simultaneously yes and no.

The President is right that the Triple Lock sits at the core of how we have described ourselves. The scholars are right that abolishing it would not change what actually defends this island. They are both correct, because they are answering different questions, yet have not noticed that while one person is speaking about “who we are”, the other is speaking of “what we can do”. It appears that despite endlessly ferocious debates, very few people are ever disagreeing.

However, we are using four or five exhausted words (Security! Defense! Neutrality! Sovereignty!) to mean about three dozen different things each, and then are somehow shocked that we cannot understand one another. What is happening today is not a debate. It is a nation of people, emotional with certainty, grasping onto a different dimension of the same few words, never willing to concede that we have never, in a hundred years, agreed what any of them mean.

So, before anything useful can be said about Irish neutrality, we have to go back to the beginning.

To War, Or Not To War

There’s a tradition of thinking about war, force, and the state that goes back thousands of years. Its ideas run underneath practically all of modern politics, because sooner or later every country has to argue with itself about how it should defend itself, and ultimately what its soldiers are for.

However, and contrary to common thinking, these aren’t technical questions for generals to settle and everyone else to ignore. They’re the most fundamental assumptions a state is built on. These questions about power and war aren’t downstream of the state; rather the state is downstream of them. So refusing to think about war and power isn’t rising above “unworthy things”, it’s leaving the foundation unexamined, and running a country without ever asking what the country is for.

Ireland has taken in almost none of this. It’s worth running quickly through what we skipped, because a lot of what’s wrong with our defense follows straight from it. There are four questions here, and every serious country has answered them.

Question One: Is war ever justified?

The oldest question is whether war can be judged in moral terms at all. One tradition says no: war is simply a fact of the world, like the mathematical constant “pi”; it’s not good or evil, just something to be managed through necessity. This is the hard-headed realism that runs from Thucydides to Machiavelli. The opposing tradition is the “just war” theory handed down from Augustine and Aquinas, which says that force can and must be judged; that there are right and wrong reasons to go to war, right and wrong ways to fight it, and clear duties once it ends.

Every defense policy in Europe falls somewhere between these two poles. And each one rests, even if no single policy explicitly ever mentions this, on some idea of when killing is justified.

Ireland has no such idea, because Ireland was never forced to form one. Instead, we built a national identity out of moral seriousness. We are the small country that speaks up for poorer ones while occasionally lecturing the great powers on international law from the floor of the United Nations. But we do all of this without ever having built a real army, and without any actual power to act in the world. So our moral seriousness never cost us anything and never put us at any risk. In other words, we have precisely zero skin in the game.

Of course, it is easy to take the moral high ground when claiming it costs nothing and risks nothing. While Ireland does have an army (one that has served abroad with real distinction!), the State never gave it the scale or the investment to put any weight behind our words. This is not to be confused with pacifism, which is a genuine position, argued for and paid for. It is simply that we are… unarmed.

“Legacy” by Steve Alpert

Question Two: How does war actually work?

The founding idea here comes from a Prussian soldier named Carl von Clausewitz, who wrote that war is “the continuation of policy by other means.” He meant that war is just politics carried on with weapons, and that an army is the force standing behind a country’s foreign policy; the silent but lethal threat that makes other states take its words seriously.

Others added to this millenia-old debate. Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese strategist, said that the best commander wins without fighting at all, through careful positioning and deception. A line of thinkers after a guy called Kant argued that democracies do not go to war with one another (hello globalization). The strategists of the technological and nuclear age showed how the threat of force alone can change an enemy’s behavior without a single shot being fired, and that more lethal weapons become, paradoxically, the more likely peace.

The common thread is simple: military power and foreign policy are bound together as two sides of the same coin, and it is the ability to act with force that gives a country’s words any real weight.

Now hold Irish foreign policy up against that framework. It is close to Sun Tzu, perhaps, except with the whole strategy thing (the important part) removed. In that we are all talk but without any force; merely words with nothing standing behind them. When Ireland speaks at the Security Council, every other country in the room knows there is nothing giving credence to our words. We have no military or leverage to uphold. Sadly, for a long time, we have confused being heard with having influence.

Question Three: Who do the soldiers answer to?

Who should a soldier ultimately obey? A general? The prime minister? What about the citizens? Brussels? Even NATO? It is a live question today, in a Europe that has begun to talk about a “European army”, and indeed a real question that several Gardaí provoked during the fuel protests as they wondered to whom their allegiances lay: the farmers or Jim O’Callaghan.

The modern democratic answer is what’s called the Parliamentary Army, in which elected civilians sit firmly above the military, and the military does what they decide.

Ireland has perfect civilian control over its armed forces, but only for the same reason a person without a car has a perfect driving record; there is almost nothing there to control. And on the rare occasion the system is actually tested, the hollowness is obvious. Let’s revisit the fuel protests, when our Minister for Justice called in the Army to clear cars, as if the military were just an arm of the police.

In Germany, the constitution flatly forbids this. In France, it would take a formal request passed up the defense chain and signed off by the President. In Ireland, on the other hand, as farmers and hauliers blockaded the country’s only oil refinery in April, the Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan announced that the Defence Forces were being sent to clear them, and warned the vehicles’ owners not to complain if their property was damaged. There was one problem: the Army was not his to send. Soldiers answer to the Minister for Defence, and reach the streets only on a formal Garda request for “aid to the civil power.” O’Callaghan had committed the military from the wrong department, and without consulting the Defence Minister or the Defence Forces, who learned of it along with the public.

The deployment itself was pretty inconsequential as it was only a couple of recovery trucks. But the point is that the soldiers had no clear legal power to use force, so the Government passed a retrospective law, after the fact, to authorize what it had already done. This is literally something that could have become an episode of Father Ted, except for the fact that it would have been too absurd.

And this is what happens when a country has never deliberated upon one of the most foundational questions of a state — who its soldiers answer to; and when no line has never been drawn to be crossed in the first place. Hence you can only imagine how absurd it is for Ireland to be brokering the most consequential contemporary decisions of European defense over the next few months.

Question Four: What is a country’s military character?

Finally, there is what scholars call strategic culture. This is really about the deep-set assumptions and instincts a country brings to the use of force, often without realizing it has them. This topic is enormously important when creating defense strategies and policies

Germany, scarred by the twentieth century, built up a powerful culture of military restraint, so deeply held that breaking it, in 2022, required a special word: Zeitenwende, “a turning of the age”, just to acknowledge the shocking change. This is the proof, if ever you needed it, that a country’s military character is real, long-term, and very deliberately chosen. And that a nation can change it, too, when it needs to.

America’s character is the opposite in that it is decisive, technology-driven, and drawn to the overwhelming force of a Western great power. China built a culture of patience and plays the long game, content to wait it out. Its instinct is to hide its strength, bide its time, and let a rival wear themselves out, so that the contest is half-won before it has openly begun.

Each military culture is a stance a country thought its way towards, and could explain and defend.

What about Ireland? We would like to believe it is restraint, and that Ireland, like Germany, made a serious moral decision to stay out of the business of global conflict. But Germany’s restraint is a strong state deliberately holding itself back; it is restraint chosen from a position of strength. Irish “restraint” is the condition of a state that never had any strength to hold back in the first place; but in which it occasionally dabbles when the commercial impetus exists. Germany’s historic restraint is a decision, while the Irish restraint is an indecision. And the central lie of Irish strategic culture is that we have spent a century pretending to be like the first type of restraint when in fact we are the second. We convince ourselves that our refusal to build any defense at all is a wise and principled choice.

Ok, so with that foundation, let’s roll up the sleeves and get into the topic that everybody’s shouting about.

What is Neutrality, Really?

So, neutrality. Before we argue about keeping it or dropping it, there’s a more basic problem: the word has at least five different dimensions.

Legal status, or policy posture?

At one end, neutrality is a formal legal status, à la the 1907 Hague Conventions. It is a binding bargain that says: you must stay strictly impartial; it is your responsibility to keep belligerents off your territory by force if you must; and in return your borders are legally inviolable. At the other end is policy neutrality; a loose, unilateral posture of staying out of military affairs which is cheaper and comes with flexibility, but ultimately very flimsy, holding only as long as others choose to respect it.

Ireland sits at the loose end, with our neutrality being in neither a treaty nor Constitution. But the spectrum isn’t really the point, as Sweden and Finland sat at that same loose end and armed themselves heavily anyway. You see, they understood that exactly because a neutral has no allies, a neutral must be able to defend itself. That is exactly what the Irish idea rejects, and is the only example of neutrality in the world to do so. To everyone else, “neutral” means armed and self-reliant; to us it means unarmed and uninvolved. This is not a softer version of the concept but its complete opposite. In fact, we couldn’t be legally neutral even if we tried! Because it would mean arming ourselves for our own defense, which is the exact thing our current definition of neutrality exists to avoid. Neutrality for everybody else produces independence, which is the entire point. But ours produces dependence.

A means, or an end?

Is neutrality a tool we use, or a value we are? A tool is something that you use while it works, and then get rid of when you no longer need it. A value is something that you hold onto, no matter what. Irish neutrality began firmly as a tool that served two purposes at once. Abroad, it kept a small, broke, newly independent state (Ireland) out of the Second World War and off the Cold War’s front line. At home, it justified keeping the army small, because the last thing our newly formed government needed were more state-sponsored militia to rival the new political apparatus. Although even abroad our “neutrality” was never as “neutral” as we discuss, as all through the war we helped the Allies, feeding them weather reports (one that even fixed the date of D-Day) and returning their downed airmen while interning the Germans’. It began as a tool, in short, that was used to manage threats abroad and rivals at home.

But over the decades the tool became a value, and a part of who we think we are. And once neutrality turned into an identity, it became impossible to question. To suggest Ireland buy a radar surely means you are “abandoning neutrality”. It is therefore now discussed as if a defense purchase were a betrayal of the national soul.

Negative, or positive?

Negative neutrality is just staying out of things, whereas positive neutrality is doing something active for peace. We vastly prefer the positive story, and to be fair it is a real one that we mostly all identify with. Irish troops have worn the blue helmet almost continuously since the early 1960s, while holding the line in south Lebanon since 1978, and have died doing it. It is an honorable record.

But two things have gone wrong with it. First, we use it to dignify what is mostly the negative version (i.e. not spending, and not joining, and not committing) as though a few hundred peacekeepers answers the question of national defense in its entirety. Second, even the honorable part needs capacity, and that capacity is rapidly draining away. The Defence Forces are at their lowest strength in fifty years, and the overseas service we are proudest of gets harder to sustain every year. You cannot be the world’s peacemaker without… peacemakers. And equipment to give peacemakers. This needs to come from… an increased defense budget. The one respectable thing we point to, we are rapidly losing the ability to do.

Armed, or unarmed?

So, the big one. If you have no allies, the entire job of defending yourself falls on you alone. That is exactly why every other neutral in Europe is so heavily armed. Switzerland conscripts its men and keeps fallout shelters for its whole population. Meanwhile, Finland fields one of the largest artillery forces on the continent and a reserve it can call up in days, because it shares a border with Russia, which it is constantly reminded of.

Ireland, however, managed the one combination that makes no sense at all! We have maximum responsibility for our island, but with minimum capacity. In other words, we took on the full burden of defending ourselves, with no alliance to fall back on, and then built almost nothing (no fighter jets, no primary radar, no air defence of any kind, a navy that cannot put most of its ships to sea) to do so. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes said it best four centuries ago: “covenants, without the sword, are but words”. Which is why the moment our defense is tested, the people who actually respond are the British and the Americans.

Recognized, or not?

This is the one facet of neutrality we like least, because it takes the matter out of our hands entirely. Neutrality is not something you declare; it is something others grant. It works only because violating a recognized neutral carries an enormous diplomatic, legal, and reputational cost; and that cost is what keeps the bad actors out.

If you remove the cost, there is obviously nothing left to deter anyone. As such, Ireland imposes no cost to those who seek to interfere with us. Russia runs intelligence operations from Irish soil against the rest of Europe, sends its shadow fleet through our waters hundreds of times a year, and has had vessels mapping the cables on our seabed openly, because it knows nothing will happen in response.

Our friends don’t exactly treat us as self-sufficient or neutral either. Britain defends our airspace for us, which is the opposite of recognizing our capabilities. Of course, Churchill spent the war itching to seize our Atlantic ports, just as the Americans have used Shannon as a military waystation for decades. To our enemies we are an undefended gap; to our friends, a dependent that can be extracted from. So if neither our friends nor our foes see us as neutral… Are we?

Across each of these five dimensions, Ireland attempts to take the most impressive interpretation yet delivers the more hollow one. And beneath this lies enormous questions. Neutral, but to what end? Non-aligned, but against what? Defended, but to protect who?

What Are We Protecting?

Defense policy is so tightly interlinked with philosophy because it seeks to answer a single question: what are you protecting?

Strategists call the thing being protected the referent object, and they’re strict about what counts. It isn’t the thing that’s merely useful but the thing of ultimate worth. The thing whose loss would feel like losing yourself, not just losing a function; and something a country holds to be worth surviving for, for its own sake. In French, they call this the raison d’être.

Ask the question in Ireland, and many defense hawks will say: we’re protecting the subsea cables, the data, the grid, and the sovereign sea. And the threat to those is absolutely real, so sure! But none of them is a thing of ultimate worth. Nobody loves a cable, just as nobody ever bled for a data centre. They aren’t what we’re protecting; they’re the equipment we need and the infrastructure an open, connected society relies on to keep being itself.

Because underneath what are you protecting lies a harder question, which is: protecting which way of life?

A couple of years ago I spent a week in the Austrian Alps with the Austrian military, on a cross-border European exercise. Afterwards I got talking to a young Austrian soldier about Europe’s rush to rearm. I asked whether the new military posture worried him; why he didn’t just take an office job in the city. He nearly teared up as he told me he would die to protect the life his family had lived in those mountains for generations. It made me think about Ireland. Do people die for tax havens? Would anyone give their life to defend a low corporate rate?

What way of life – what something that is recognizably ours – are the undersea cables, at the end of the day, there to serve? To say what way of life you’re protecting is to say what you value. And to say what you value is to say who you are.

Go one level deeper still and you reach the oldest question of all. What is a state even for? The textbook answer is that a state is the one body allowed to use force inside its own borders, and its first job (the thing that justifies it existing at all) is to protect the people in it. Protection is indeed what earns a government the right to govern us. A state that can’t protect its people hasn’t earned the authority it claims over them.

Ok, but Ireland might concede all of this about physical defense and say: that was never what our state was for. Perhaps Ireland, like much of post-war Europe, was able to redefine what protection means. That this meaning has moved away from protection against physical threats and towards something more domestic: social protection. The safety net of a roof, a hospital bed, a pension, and a school place. In this model, the state is not as a guardian standing at the gates, but a carer looking after the people inside it.

But is the Irish state actually protecting us there either? It is the question I have been circling in these essays, and the figures are not suggesting that it is upholding this definition either. This is a state failing at both hard and soft protection; that is unable to defend the island from a hostile foreign or domestic power, and unable to house its own children or treat its own sick people. By the state’s own founding logic, a country that protects its people in neither sense has stopped doing the one thing that justifies a state at all.

From Colony to Colonel

The political philosopher Frantz Fanon understood the colonized mind as well as anybody could. The “self” that is created under colonialism, he wrote, is a “reactive self”; one that is built in opposition to the colonizer, and that only identifies itself only by what it isn’t. In this way, it can tell you, fluently, everything it is not. But it has little to say the moment you ask what it is.

That is the founding condition of the Irish state, and it explains the empty space where a defense should exist. Irish identity was forged over centuries of unsparing struggle against Britain, and it was importantly built almost entirely out of refusals.

We’re not British! We’re not imperial! Nor are we militarists! The Empire was an unyielding war machine, so to be Irish was to be the opposite of such a horrifying apparatus. The army, the navy, and the whole setup of organized force were the tools of the occupier. They were the very things our newly created state had defined itself by rejecting. A people that wins its freedom by refusing the oppressor’s tools doesn’t then turn around and build those same tools for itself. So unsurprisingly, to arm seriously would have felt, somewhere consciously or subconsciously, like becoming the thing our previous generations died to escape.

And so historically no defense policy could ever be built, because there was no positive identity to build it on. You can’t reason your way from we are not a war-making power like our former masters… to… here is what our physical power is for. Because the first sentence forecloses the second. Thus, an identity made entirely of refusals can’t produce a plan, because a plan needs a positive claim about what you are and what you mean to do. It requires the one sentence the reactive self has never managed to say.

In short, we knew, with our whole hearts, what we were against. But we never decided what we were for.

There’s a real grief in this. We spent eight hundred years learning, brilliantly, how to say no. To British landlords, to an overseas parliament, to a bloodthirsty empire, and later to a church that moved into the same overbearing space. We became the Great Refuser! And that refusal bled into an entire genre of literature, of politics, and of a national character of real and lasting beauty, that has long since defined us.

And then one day, the very institutions we had defined ourselves against finally let go of us, and there was no one left to refuse. So what does a country do when it has spent eight hundred years refusing, finally has nothing left to refuse, and never built a positive identity to put in its place? It must perform one instead.

“Choppers” by Steve Alpert

The Expressive State

There’s a name for these identities that are performed freely; something that you’ll find has been woven through many of my last essays.

Call it the expressive state: a state that buys the expression of an identity while skipping the investment that would make it real.

Neutrality is one of the clearest cases of this. “Neutral” is an expressive good. It says something flattering about us. We’re moral! We’re independent, peaceable, and far, far above the grubby arithmetic of bigger nations! We bought this identity quickly, of course, but what we refuse to buy alongside it is the one thing that would make it true: the armed self-reliance that “neutral” means everywhere else.

Like everything, we wanted the meaning of the word without the cost of it. We wanted to be Switzerland in the imagination of our self-reliance, and Liechtenstein in our budget. Yet we ended up as neither a respected armed neutral, nor an honest partner in a shared defense contribution. We are a free-rider claiming independence under a security paid for by others, while somehow still blowing through budget after budget regardless.

And the Expressive State is not just about defense, as it runs straight through the thing we are proudest of – our moral voice in the world.

We are forever the first to speak yet hardly ever the ones who have paid for the speaking. We had to be the first country to throw open our doors to Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s invasion (a genuinely generous and moral thing to do), but then never built the capacity for such generosity. As we watch beds run out, we now pay them to go back to the war they came from.

We condemn Russia in every room we can reach and arm Ukraine with our words, while on the Shannon Estuary sits Aughinish Alumina, one of the largest Russian-owned industrial assets in the European Union, shipping significant output to Russian smelters in a chain that investigators have traced toward the manufacturers supplying Russia’s war. Indeed, successive Irish governments have lobbied to keep the plant exempt from sanctions in a bid to protect the jobs around Limerick, and a senior minister has said flatly that there is no contradiction between supporting Ukraine and shipping the alumina. And we lecture the world on Gaza; the first EU state to call for a Palestinian state, decades back, and among the loudest against Israel now; while in 2024, at the height of the assault, our own Department of Enterprise signed off €20 million of dual-use technology bound for the Israeli military and its defense ministry, and only stopped granting the licenses in 2025, after a reporter dragged the figures into the open under freedom-of-information law.

Three causes we are proud of, with three loud moral postures, propped up by material facts indicating that what we say and what we do, are in fact different things entirely. That is the expressive state in its purest form. Buying the sentiment we wish to extend cheaply, but skipping the expensive substance, over and over, until the gaping hole between what we say and what we do becomes the most reliable thing about us.

So why won’t we just do the hard thing? Why, if offered an identity that actually fits us, do we cling so hard to the empty one that we all seem to despise?

Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall…

The answer goes deeper than money, as always. The crux of the post-colonial struggle, long after a war of independence is won, is the one that actually decides whether a nation becomes “free” or merely “unoccupied”. This hard and oft-failed task of getting past the reactive self to a generative one, is the one we now face. It is the one in which we are not defined by a refusal but by the agency of our own choices. To decide our own identity.

Most post-colonial countries never finish the transition, because the reactive self is so much more comfortable to live in. Refusal is morally clean, but those that have neither skin in the game nor the courage to move forward, are the same ones that also sadly end up with very little to lose.

We see this frequently at the level of a person who, years after the bad parent or the terrible ex, is still organized entirely around the wound they were left with. Their identity has fuzed with the grievance, meaning that the person who hurt them is still, in a sense, running their life. Why don’t they change? Because they experience the same comfort a nation finds in neutrality. For as long as you are the wronged one, you are never the one at fault. And you therefore never have to make the terrifying, exposed move of saying this is who I am and this is what I want, because wanting something means you might not be given it, and trying to build something means you can fail at it. So of course, refusal keeps you safe in a way that pursuing a desire never can. But the trouble is that it also keeps you alone, and small, and stuck. Everyone knows someone who has grieved a life they didn't go on to build. And Ireland is that person: a country that a hundred years later is still so busy not being Britain that it never got around to becoming itself.

Perhaps this version of neutrality is our reactive self’s last and favorite hiding place, allowing us to avoid defining who we are. And the reason it is debated so passionately.

And that is the real reason this essay was so hard to write. I could sit down to write about the Triple Lock, or radar systems, or the vast sea dotted with Russian-speaking vessels, but what would be the point? Because neutrality is not the problem. It is only the part of the problem that can be seen from the surface. Pull the thread and our lackluster defense apparatus is downstream of a neutrality we never defined; and the neutrality we never defined is downstream of a state that never decided what it was for; and that empty space at the centre of the state is downstream of the hardest thing of all. Of who we are, a people patch-worked across eight hundred years made entirely out of “we are not’s”.

Security policy is downstream of the state — but importantly, the state is downstream of us.

Which is why the great debate I started by describing with settles nothing, however fierce it gets. No radar fixes an ill-contemplated identity, just as no referendum can answer the question the referendum exists to avoid. Keep the Triple Lock or scrap it, but either way we still won’t have the aircraft we need to go up to meet the Russian jet, just as we likely won’t have one more ship to put to sea, nor one more cable on the seabed being watched. Changing the Triple Lock will still leave the real question exactly where it was placed a century ago.

And this argument feels enormous because it is enormous. It is a real fight, about a real question, with real stakes. But the very size of this question around neutrality is also exactly what makes it so useful — because the debate has come to mirror the thing it is about. Neutrality is an ill-defined word we each pour our own meaning into; just as the debate over neutrality has become an ill-defined fight we each pour our own conviction into. Passionately, righteously and strangely certain, and yet still we never quite reach the actual question underneath that we need to get to. Which is, in the end: what is any of it for?

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Note: Since I started this substack specifically to write about power, geo-economics and defense, it seems strange that I should have to say that — yes, I am involved in these things! I am a defense economist, investor and policymaker, and have been for quite some time. I also run Security Ireland, which might be called a think tank on a good day, but is probably closer to being a website with my policy musings which has generated interesting discussions with some academics who similarly like to pontificate in similar ways. Needless to say, I have no commercial interests in Ireland’s policies, and have on numerous times rejected all donations to do it more formally. I write about these topics, including this post, because I am deeply interested in the subject area and because, of course, I care about Ireland.

I will discuss this in greater detail in my next post, in which I have decided to take the leap and wade into the discussion around the Triple Lock.

I also want throw out there that I am the exact embodiment of what pockets of people in Ireland have feared arriving for a long time to Ireland’s shores: a trans-Atlanticist elite, trained at the School of Evil Globalism (Harvard, and I don’t necessarily disagree with this framing), having interacted with just about every defense, security, and intelligence agency that there is. On a more serious note, I want to actually break this down by discussing the defense industry, and will do so next time.

Thanks again for reading, if you’re still here! S.