Ireland - The Cosseted Child of Europe

Unable to defend itself.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky arrived in Ireland this week for his first official state visit. Extensive security measures were put in place across Dublin and the surrounding areas ahead of the high-profile visit. It has since emerged that four military drones breached a no-fly zone and flew toward Zelensky’s plane shortly before it landed at Dublin Airport on Monday night. They were drones, but not the sort you buzz the neighbour’s cat with. It is being reported that these were serious, military-grade pieces of hardware, and for two unhurried hours, they did lazy, insolent loops in the sky above an Irish naval vessel, their navigation lights brazenly glowing in the dark. It was less an intrusion than a slow, deliberate loitering, a military mechanical staring contest.

No one is officially putting a name to the culprits. Russian? Probably. Nuisance-happy hobbyists with suspiciously deep pockets? Your guess is as good as MI6’s. But the Irish security services have a theory. With Zelensky due to touch down, drones that fly with their lights on aren’t trying to be subtle; they’re trying to be seen. The aim wasn’t surveillance so much as theatre, a deliberate flex to rattle the cage and complicate the diplomatic proceedings. It’s the sort of provocation that’s too deniable to be an act of war, but too pointed to be anything but hostile. In the parlance of our times, it’s what you’d call a spot of ‘hybrid warfare’: cost-effective, electronically delivered bullying, leaving a sovereign nation to scratch its head and wonder why anyone would be annoyed at us.

Zelensky’s aircraft touched down slightly ahead of schedule at 11 p.m., a fortunate detail, as the drones would have been directly in President Zelensky’s flight path if it had arrived on time. Some security analysts are calling it an assassination attempt on Zelensky.

We all really know who was behind this. The Russian quislings in the Irish Parliament will talk about NATO and provocation. But Ireland is like a small child in geopolitical terms, unable to defend itself and not a member of NATO, but we are the vulnerable backdoor into Europe for Russia, and we are sitting on unprotected digital gold. Roughly three out of every four undersea data cables in the entire northern hemisphere are obliged to meander through Ireland’s vast liquid backyard, which is 10 times our land mass. Every cat TikTok from New York, every terse Brussels communiqué to Washington, every billion-dollar London stock trade, most of it takes a compulsory, deep-sea detour through this one nation’s jurisdiction. All of it unprotected, successive governments goaded by an opposition into neglecting our security on the principle of laissez-faire neutrality.

Ireland likes to think of itself as a small, heroic little Republic in a dangerous world, a plucky emerald bauble bobbing bravely against the choppy seas of transatlantic geopolitics, humming ballads about defeating imperialism. At the same time, the hundreds of Russian ghost ships glide past the fibre‑optic cables that pulse under the waves like the nervous system of some enormous, comatose digital god. In hard geopolitical security terms, Ireland is closer to a pampered child at the end of a well‑policed cul‑de‑sac. The big houses in the local neighbourhood pay for the private security, the floodlights, the patrols that keep the wolves from the manicured lawns. The neighbours also keep installing new locks, new cameras, new alarms, while Ireland props the front door open with a copy of its non-existent neutrality proclamation and grandly calls it a principle. Naively thinking that hostile fascist powers respect principles.

The miracle here is that the Irish child is rich. Not just “grand, can afford the round” rich, but a statistical hallucination of prosperity, GDP per head swollen by corporate tech and pharma behemoths taking advantage of our favourable tax laws. Multinational money is sluicing through the country like rainwater off a tin roof. On paper, this is one of the wealthiest corners of the globe; in practice, when you look for the instruments by which serious states insist on their continued existence, you find a handful of ships, some overstretched soldiers and sailors, and a nonexistent ability to defend ourselves. The richest family on the street, no locks on the door, but very strong opinions about the ethics of locksmithing.

Every cul‑de‑sac has one of these families. They vaguely understand that an underlying danger exists; they have seen the footage from Ukraine, the shards of tower blocks, the sudden hot light of artillery in the distance, but they cannot permit the thought that any of this belongs to the same world as their own. For them, war is not a material process but a sort of moral failing, something that happens in regrettable countries to people who did not read the right poetry. The Irish version is called neutrality. It pads around the house in its socks, murmuring about the triple locks and the UN, telling anyone who will listen that it does not “do” sides, while its internet traffic crosses cables that are explicitly defended by other countries’ navies and its skies protected by its former colonial masters in the UK. An Irish solution to an Irish problem.

This is what sovereignty looks like after a lifetime of outsourcing. We like to outsource in Ireland. For decades, we’ve outsourced our health and housing problems to “charities”. Very rarely has this outsourcing worked. For longer still, we’ve outsourced our security to the UK, USA and NATO. How does that make us neutral? Our laissez-faire approach to neutrality has, in fact, made us a target for bad state actors.

Irish airspace is like a ring doorbell pointed at the sky, but the ring doorbell is in the UK: Ireland gets the notification if something really nasty shows up, and we rely on calling someone else to deal with it. An unidentified aircraft wanders in from the North Atlantic, and somewhere in Lincolnshire, a jet spools up; the child peers out from behind the curtains and congratulates itself on having maintained a principled distance from the whole affair. The seas around Ireland bristle with infrastructure – gas pipes, data lines, the capillaries of a continent, and decades of Irish security policy was to essentially hope that no one noticed.

Naturally, everyone has noticed. Military planners in London, Washington and Brussels talk about Ireland in the same way an exhausted parent talks about childproofing the house. If you wanted to test the defences of the European order without starting World War Three, you would not go straight for Berlin or Paris; you would look for something softer, somewhere the guardians feel responsible for, but the legal paperwork is hazy, a place full of crucial systems and sentimental stories and very little actual steel. You would look at the island that insists it is neutral while flying, economically, digitally and politically, in tight formation with the same system it refuses to help defend.

Ireland’s self‑image, understandably, does not enjoy this description. Ireland narrates itself in the heroic register: small but principled, a nation that shook off an empire and now wanders the earth in a blue helmet, mopping up after other people’s catastrophes, radiating moral authority from behind a modest smile. In this story, neutrality is a kind of sainthood. The state remains untainted by alliance politics, unsullied by the grubby calculus of deterrence; it arrives, eventually, with medics, engineers and U.N. peacekeepers, like a conscience dropping by after the damage has been done.

Look closely at this sainthood, and you see a cheaper arrangement. Neutrality is not written in stars or stone; it is an improvisation. The country does not abstain from war so much as it abstains from the price of preparing for one. We have a talent for moralising the lack of certain capacities: no jets becomes a principled suspicion of air power; a threadbare navy becomes a deep spiritual commitment to not being a “militarised state.” Even the constitutional palaver over sending troops abroad functions mainly as a ritual scene in which a certain kind of political class re‑enacts its reluctance to possess a force able to defend itself. We will go to the countries less fortunate than ourselves, yes, but do not worry, we are very conflicted about it.

Meanwhile, the new multipolar world obligingly refuses to play this game. War has returned to Europe, not as archival footage but as live‑streamed carnage; cables have been cut, pipelines mysteriously sabotaged, and energy systems flickered in the dark. The things that make Ireland rich – the tax arrangements, the data centres humming gently in business parks, the invisible streams of numbers crossing the continental shelf are now recognised as potential targets. The Atlantic is no longer a protective moat; it’s a tangle of cables and pipes, each one a fragile strand that could easily be broken as it’s largely undefended. The consequences would be dire if they were broken.

In this setting, the spectacle of a state that spends lavishly to attract the world’s tech giants but baulks at the cost of defending the physical infrastructure that makes us rich becomes less a charming idiosyncrasy and more a structural absurdity. It is like watching someone mortgage their house to buy a collection of antiques and then refusing, on ethical grounds, to have a front door. When neighbours point out that this might not be wise, Ireland patiently explains that front doors are escalatory. If you start with a door, next thing you know, you are buying a lock, and ring doorbell, and that is how an arms races begin.

To be fair, the child has begun to notice the brick through the window in the next street. Budgets rise; white papers flutter down from government departments, solemn and heavy as overfed pigeons. There are promises of radar and sonar, of patrol aircraft, of more people in uniform who know which way to point a rifle. Committees declare that previous levels of ambition were insufficient and that a new level, still modest but at least numerically larger, will now be pursued. The political language shifts from complacent neutrality to “shared European responsibilities” and “hybrid threats.” The cul‑de‑sac is reluctantly considering the possibility of at least putting a latch on the door.

But even here, a particular kind of Irish incantion persists: the ability to turn the bare minimum into a grand gesture. Doubling almost nothing still leaves you with very little. The government promises a transformation, an unprecedented leap, that will leave the country spending still less than most of its peers and possessing, at the end of the process, something that could generously be described as the outline of a modest, modern defence. It is like a teenager agreeing to start doing chores around the house and announcing this as a revolutionary break with centuries of oppression. The security, the insurance, the responsibility for the street itself – these things can remain someone else’s problem.

What makes all this more than just a domestic eccentricity is the way Ireland’s self‑flattering story depends on the very order it refuses to help maintain. The island’s prosperity is not some natural efflorescence of limestone and rain; it is the product of a global system of trade, law and power, a system held together, ultimately, by the possibility of force. American carrier groups, satellite constellations, and nuclear submarines are as much a part of the Irish economic miracle as low corporation tax. The Irish state lives inside an architecture built largely by the same military multinational forces it professes to oppose, now suitably redecorated and multilateralised so that the old trauma can be polished into myth while the financial benefits to the state roll in.

This is the real indecency at the heart of the “heroic neutral” pose. It is not that Ireland refuses to buy enough fighter jets to impress the sort of people who use fighter jets to protect themselves. It is that it demands to be treated as a fully sovereign moral subject while leaving the unromantic work of ensuring its continued existence to others. It is the demeanour of a young adult that insists it has moved out while its laundry still appears in the wash basket, mysteriously cleaned and folded, at the end of the bed. The Atlantic cables hum, guarded by navies whose flags never fly in Dublin’s parades, but the Irish Republic lectures them about multilateralism.

There is a perfectly respectable case for staying out of NATO, for maintaining some distance from American geopolitical clusterfucks, for preferring the blue helmet to the alliance badge. But that case only holds if neutrality is backed by something other than naivety. To be truly neutral in this world is to have the means to make invasion, sabotage or coercion so expensive that no one bothers, to build a hard shell around your moral core. Anything less is not neutrality; it is a politically bankrupt superstition.

So the choice before Ireland is disarmingly simple. We can grow up: accept that the stories we tell ourselves also incur obligations, that sovereignty is not a vibe but an infrastructure, and that a state rich enough to host the data of half the world has no excuse for treating its own defence as an afterthought. Or it can continue as the child in the cul‑de‑sac, tugging at its parents’ sleeves, insisting it is “neutral” while other people’s aircraft circle overhead and other people’s ships comb the seabed, a ward of a new world order it pretends to float above. The dangerous thing about refusing to grow up is not that the world will punish you for your innocence. It is possible that eventually, the adults may decide to stop paying for your innocence, and you’ll be punished by others for it anyway.