Left, Right or Centre: Who Will Claim Ireland’s Post-Neutrality Space?

Perennial Irish misgivings about the nation’s place in the Anglo-American military alliance or EU militarisation are unlikely to avert a date with destiny in the not too distant future about Dublin’s threadbare defence policy.

Caught between the Scylla of a populist commitment to neutrality at home and the Charybdis of the fact we are member’s of a de facto geopolitical union with Brussels Irish neutrality has been straining at the seams since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine two years ago.

Indeed with Irish troops likely prepping to switch Lebanon for Donbass in their peacekeeping duties shortly and Ireland throwing its weight around internationally on the Gaza issue one even wonders how military matters no more on the political agenda.

The problem lies not only in government complacency but in the structure of our democracy itself. Defence barely registers in election cycles even the ongoing  Áras 2025 campaign, despite the President’s nominal military role.

Defence talk at election time is drowned out by parish-level concerns about local hospitals, or bus routes. Unlike a standard European or normal state cyber-vulnerability, or military deployments are seen as peripheral technocratic issues, left to drift until a crisis forces them to the surface. 

This abdication is dangerous.

War in Moldova, Armenia, Georgia, the Sahel, a messy decoupling from China nevermind a flare up in the Western Balkans are all potentially on the horizon by decade’s end even before the issue of post-bellum Gaza and Ukraine raised with the state already ceding sovereignty on cyberdefence following the 2021 HSE malware attack. 

Defining neutrality as a deluded brand of pacifism the Irish public has been sold the illusion that neutrality shields us from becoming a target, but in the cyber age there are no neutral states, only weak ones. The Emergency worked only because Britain and America tolerated our stance; UN missions were viable only when superpowers sought stability. Today’s world is more multipolar, unstable, and ruthless. To cling to the old myths is to misread history as prophecy.

Lebanon may have served as a stage for Ireland’s moral theatre; Donbass or the Sahel will not. 

The left’s clichés about “schools not soldiers” and the right’s equally shallow mutterings about “protecting our own” miss the core issue. Both wings shy away from the reality of an inevitable remilitarisation of Irish life. Not because we wish it, but because the strategic environment will demand it. Pretending that Ireland can forever float above the turbulence is not a policy it is a gamble, and one we are poorly positioned to win.

If Ireland is to chart a course true to its sovereignty, it must break free from these inherited reflexes. Neutrality cannot mean denial, nor can security mean vassalage. The question is not whether Ireland will militarise, but on what terms: as a client of Anglo-American or Brussels designs, or as a state that finally takes responsibility for its own security.

The Irish left is particularly ill-equipped to navigate a post-neutral landscape. For decades, neutrality has been treated not as a strategic position but as a moral identity, a badge of virtue that distinguishes Ireland from imperial powers. This has bred a reflexive hostility to any discussion of hard power. Once neutrality collapses under the weight of geopolitical reality, the left is left with little to offer and worse still will not be able to adapt its contrarian pseudo-republican rhetoric.

For the conservative and populist right, defence should be an obvious terrain of ownership. 

In a geopolitical order where the small and the unarmed are playthings of the powerful, sovereignty is meaningless without the capacity to defend it. UN declarations don’t matter when the global hegemon is about to unsheathe its blade against China or state legitimacy is under threat from a neverending stream of cyber threats and non-state actors.

Defence is the ultimate sovereignist matter: without it, every other argument about national control becomes abstract. If conservatives wish to distinguish themselves from the managerial liberalism of the establishment, they must show that sovereignty is not only a matter of sentiment or symbolism but of practical power.

Similarly attaching mass migration as a subset of this new securitization is useful in of itself.

The crisis is coming and a post-neutral state is emerging one way or anotehr. Whether sparked by escalation in Eastern Europe, instability in US-China relations, cyber-sabotage of Irish infrastructure, or the sudden exposure of our Atlantic vulnerabilities, the reckoning cannot be deferred forever. 

Ireland will be forced to choose: drift into further dependence or seize the sovereign path and do the rudimentary requirements of statehood.