The Irish Neutrality League Is Still Stuck In 1914
Neutrality? More Like Naivety!
The Irish Neutrality League is back—because nothing says “serious foreign policy” like a group of politicians who think the world operates on the same rules as a student debating society. In an era of Russian tanks rolling through Ukraine, Chinese warships bullying the South China Sea, and Iranian drones terrorizing the Middle East, Ireland’s self-appointed guardians of neutrality have decided now is the perfect time to… clutch their pearls and demand we keep asking the UN for permission to defend ourselves and the ability to send troops abroad for peacekeeping missions.
Originally, the Irish Neutrality League was founded in Dublin in September 1914—just weeks after Britain plunged into the First World War—the Irish Neutrality League was a bold but short-lived attempt to rally the then Irish nationalists against participation in what they saw as a foreign imperial conflict. It’s now been reconsituted by some incredibly naive Irish parliamentarians in trying to maintain Ireland's so-called neutrality.
Ireland’s triple lock—a mechanism so bureaucratic it could only be loved by people who think “diplomacy” means waiting for a UN committee to finish a report is their sacred cow. Never mind that the Security Council is permanently gridlocked by Russian and Chinese vetoes. Never mind that the General Assembly is about as decisive as a hungover student council. No, according to the Neutrality League, Ireland must remain pure, untouched by the messy reality that sometimes, just sometimes, the bad guys need to be stopped without permission from the UN Security Council in New York.
Ireland's "triple lock" mechanism is a diplomatic and legal safeguard that governs the country’s participation in overseas military operations. It ensures that any deployment of more than 12 Irish Defence Forces personnel on UN-mandated peacekeeping missions requires:
UN Security Council or General Assembly authorization
Irish Government approval
Dáil Éireann (Parliament) approval
The government’s proposal to raise the troop deployment threshold from 12 to 50 has triggered the usual chorus of outrage. “Militarisation!” they cry, as if sending a platoon of Irish peacekeepers to protect civilians in, say, Sudan would suddenly turn us into the war mongering Russians. Meanwhile, the EU is busy building a real defense strategy, because Brussels has noticed that Vladimir Putin isn’t impressed by strongly worded neutrality proclamations from Irish politicians whose previous behaviours might suggest they are not all that neutral.
Take Cathrine Connolly TD, (a founder of the Irish Neutrality League) who signed a letter along with former MEPs Mick Wallace and Clare Daly to the Irish Times that said “US support for the overthrow of the Assad government led to military intervention by Russia and Iran, who feared that their countries might be the next US target for overthrow”.
The letter mentioned nothing about the human rights abuses committed by the criminal Assad regime, which included torture, rape, over 300 chemical attacks and the arbitrary murder of teenage boys, their only crime of having turned 18 years of age.
In 2017, a group of far-left Irish politicians, activists, and current founders of the Irish Neutrality League, including Catherine Connolly, traveled to Syria. They obtained visas through a man linked to the regime of dictator Bashar al-Assad. The group arrived in Damascus at the same time as a Russian delegation. At the time, diplomatic relations between the Syrian regime and the EU were severely strained due to widespread human rights abuses committed by Syria and its Russian allies. The Irish delegation was criticised by many across the political spectrum in Europe and Ireland.
Why does this matter? Because it’s hard to claim neutrality when members of the Irish Neutrality League—including Connolly—accept invitations from a brutal dictatorship like Assad’s Syria, a regime propped up by Russia and Iran. All three aforementioned governments have been accused of heinous war crimes, like there’s any kind of war crimes. There’s a word for that kind of double standard coming from Connolly and her ilk: hypocrisy.
The Irish Neutrality League has strong support from Sinn Féin, Ireland’s main opposition party. Sinn Féin has a curious relationship with Russia. It deleted thousands of media statements about Russia from its website. Including a statement from Mary Lou McDonald describing then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s decision to expel a Russian diplomat over the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, England, as “a flagrant disregard for Irish neutrality”. The Russians were assassinating people across Europe, and Sinn Féin issued that very weird statement and then proceeded to delete thousands of other pro-Russian statements from their official website when people started to take notice of their past friendly pronouncements towards Russia.
Sinn Féin’s voting record in the EU parliament would suggest it has been less than neutral towards Ukraine, and a voting record that aligns strongly with Russian interests.
Sinn Féin abstained from a European Parliament resolution that called for immediate investigations into MEPs acting as agents of influence for Russia. Why would any EU political party abstain from a vote that wanted to investigate people spying for Russia in the EU?
MEPs voted overwhelmingly in favour of a report on Russian and Chinese interference in the EU that called for a strategy to combat foreign interference in EU elections. Sinn Féin abstained on that vote as well. A bit of a pattern emerging here, says you. In 2015, Sinn Féin abstained from condemning human rights abuses in Russia and the annexation of Crimea. Sinn Féin, you guessed it, abstained on an EU vote condemning the Kremlin-backed Belarusian government's actions during the democracy protests. This is the same Belarusian government that hijacked an Irish Ryanair flight and kidnapped a journalist. The European Union voted overwhelmingly to declare Russia a terrorist State. Sinn Féin abstained from voting on that also. I know priests who don't abstain as much as Sinn Féin.
When not abstaining from voting on the bad stuff Russia is doing, Sinn Féin likes to vote against things too. They voted against giving aid to Ukraine. Sinn Féin voted against adding the violation of sanctions against Russia to a list of serious crimes at the EU level. Sinn Féin voted against a resolution condemning Russian aggression against Ukraine. In December of 2021, Sinn Féin voted against a resolution in the European Parliament that supported Ukraine’s independence, which said Putin’s military build-up at Ukraine’s borders represented a threat to Europe’s peace. You can dress that up however you want, but that's some very serious pro-Russian voting and not very neutral behaviour. So when Sinn Féin show up claiming to be all for neutrality, it’s usually Russian-flavoured neutrality.
On Wednesday, the Irish Neutrality League held a press conference proclaiming Irish neutrality, and on Thursday, a Russian spy ship was prowling through Ireland’s waters, ignoring hails from the Irish Naval Service. The Viktor Leonov, a notorious intelligence-gathering vessel, is no innocent passerby—it’s a Cold War-era spy platform, packed with surveillance tech, known for shadowing US and British submarines and mapping critical undersea infrastructure. Yet, as it glides through our Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), the best we can do is watch. This isn’t an isolated incident. Three weeks ago, a Russian ghost ship, the Arne, suspected of cutting subsea cables in the Baltic, was detected near the location of transatlantic data cables in Irish waters.
Other Russian ships, like the Yantar, have become frequent visitors to Irish waters, often loitering near subsea cables—the lifelines of global internet and communications. Last November, the same ship was caught deploying drones in the Irish Sea. What were they doing? We don’t know, because Ireland lacks the means—or perhaps the will—to find out.
The Irish Neutrality Alliance clings to the fairytale that neutrality will protect us, but Putin doesn’t care about neutrality; he exploits it. Putin doesn’t take weak states seriously—he cannibalises them, and the Irish Neutrality League are his cat’s paw. Putin doesn’t care about your moral high ground—he cares about what he can get away with. And right now, his military is getting away with an awful lot in Irish waters.
The Irish Neutrality League would rather Ireland stay “neutral”—a quaint term meaning “hoping the wolves eat our neighbors first and forget about us.” They’ll hold rallies, wave placards, and lecture us about the moral high ground, all while ignoring the fact that neutrality in the 21st century isn’t a principle—it’s a fantasy. The world doesn’t care about Ireland’s pacifist daydreams. And if history has taught us anything, it’s that waiting for a UN resolution to stop aggression works about as well as Ireland’s ability to defend itself when being probed by Russian spy ships.
So by all means, let’s have the debate. But maybe—just maybe—we should admit that clinging to neutrality in an age of drones, cyberwar, and outright invasion isn’t noble. It’s delusional.
The security council has always been gridlocked. Interesting that you can write of the naivity of the triple gridlock of the Irish rules but fail to state that it is United States, China and Russia (since the era of the Soviet Union) that is the nature of the UN Security Council. The US is just as preposterous in their refusal to make agreement.