With the Irish establishment engaged in a sustained campaigned against neutrality, Kieran Allen explains the important role of the Triple Lock and why socialists shouldn’t give an inch to the warmongers.
‘A watershed moment.’ This is the repeated phrase that EU leaders use to step up military spending. And make no mistake about it – they are preparing for war.
Donald Tusk has declared that we are in a ‘pre-war era’. Mark Rutte, the head of NATO, says Europe must ‘switch to a wartime mindset’. Even the Irish Times ran the headline ‘As the EU prepares for war, Ireland sticks its head in the sand’.
The Financial Times summed it up with ‘Europe must trim its welfare state to build a warfare state’.
The Irish government has joined in these preparations. It has drafted legislation to remove the Triple Lock and declared that military spending must double from €1.5 billion to €3 billion.
Yet Ireland faces a massive housing crisis and there are long waits for hospital operations. Up to now, government spokespersons claimed that the budget surplus could not be used. Suddenly, we are told that money is available for military spending. It is truly a case of bombs not homes.
Propaganda
The mainstream media is backing up this war propaganda. RTÉ runs special interviews with Martin and Harris; former army officers appear on news channels to attack neutrality; commentators like Fergus Finley, a former senior adviser to the Labour Party, urges young working-class people to get ready to fight foreign wars.
In 2001, Irish voters rejected the Nice Treaty to keep Irish neutrality. The Irish government ran a second referendum to get through a Yes vote and pointed to a special declaration made by EU countries in Seville. This stated that Irish participation in any EU military operation would require three authorisations, a Triple Lock: the Security Council or the General Assembly of the UN, the government and the Dáil.
The attempted removal of the Triple Lock shows the political establishment’s contempt for democracy. Even though it was used to win a referendum, they refuse to put Irish neutrality to a popular vote.
Instead, their main tactic is to say they support military neutrality. By this they mean that Ireland will not, for the moment, join a formal alliance such as NATO. But they operate as outriders of this alliance. They have signed up to Partnership for Peace, a co-operation agreement with NATO. They joined PESCO, a programme to increase military spending and use NATO-compatible equipment under the guise of ‘inter-operability’. They have invited NATO officers from its Allied Maritime Command to meet the Irish navy.
This is a charade. FF and FG keep rhetorically genuflecting to neutrality but do the opposite. They know that Ireland would not add much to any war efforts. Instead, it suits NATO or the EU to have a country who is part of their informal alliance on their side. Irish neutrality is an uncomfortable alternative to their warmongering that they can’t afford.
Triple Lock
The Triple Lock represents an obstacle to the Irish state fully playing the role NATO or the EU wants. When the US invaded and colonised Afghanistan, the Irish government was only able to send 12 Irish soldiers to show their support. By removing the Triple Lock, they can become fuller outriders of the Western imperialist alliance, undertaking supposedly ‘non-lethal’ activities in support.
The political establishment have advanced two main reasons for removing the Triple Lock. They claim that the requirement for UN sanction means that Putin has a veto on Irish foreign policy. Here they are referring to the way that permanent members of the UN security council, the victors of WW2, can veto missions.
They fail to mention that UN missions can also be sanctioned by two thirds vote of the countries in the General Assembly.
In the past, the Western imperialist alliance was able to get UN Security Council sanction for supposedly ‘humanitarian’ missions. But China and Russia are no longer willing to give this cover. As a result, Western countries are more likely to create ‘coalitions of the willing’ for their overseas operations. By removing the Triple Lock, the Irish establishment gets a free hand to join such coalitions.
Aggressors
FF and FG also claim that Ireland is at risk from Russian ‘aggression’. But Russia is not the only ‘aggressor’ as Britain and the US have staged an illegal invasion of Iraq. With France, they invaded Afghanistan. Irish citizens in Bloody Sunday were murdered by British troops, not Russian troops. It is weapon arms and military support that enabled Israel to carry out its genocide in Gaza. The list could go on.
The idea that Russia can sweep across the continent to invade Ireland is patently absurd. So too is the notion that NATO could stop it cutting transatlantic cables. The Nord Stream gas link was blown up, for example, despite being beside NATO countries. Surely, the best defence against any possible aggressor is full neutrality, which would mean removing US bases, such as that in Shannon, from Irish soil.
Ukraine
The argument for greater military involvement ultimately pivots on the issue of Ukraine. This is supposed to be different from Palestine, as it has become part of Europe and is presented as a defender of European values.
But the double standards here is shocking. Israel has been in illegal occupation of Palestine for decades and has been the subject to 154 condemnatory resolutions of the UN General Assembly since 2015. Yet Germany, which now claims to stand with Ukraine, is the second biggest supplier of weapons to Israel. No FF or FG politician has even suggested that Palestinians have a legitimate right to self-defence against this aggression or that ‘non-lethal aid’ and training be given to Palestinians fighters. Yet that is often the call for Ukraine.
The reason for his hypocrisy is that Ukraine has become the touchstone of European liberalism. Here there is as a national liberation struggle against the Russia aggression. Yet the Ukrainian leadership have subordinated it to Western imperialism. The US and the EU supplied the money, the weapons, the intelligence and political solidarity while nearly 100,000 Ukrainians died fighting.
If anyone had any doubts about how it became a proxy war between Russia and its Western allies, just listen to Trump’s attack on Zelensky. The row in the White House resembled that of a master and a vassal. The master had decided that the war must end because they were not winning and had other long-term goal, namely the fight with China. The vassal cried foul but ultimately conceded the hand-over of valuable minerals.
Liberals pretend that Europe symbolises the values of human rights and the rule of law and that Ukraine has become the battle line against authoritarianism. Behind the rhetoric, EU leaders are fearful of being cut out of any deal between Trump and Putin. But the pretensions of countries like France, who offers Europe the ‘protection’ of its nuclear arsenal, and Britain, who says it will station troops in Ukraine, are easily exposed. It resembles the farce in Suez in 1956, when these colonial powers try to bluster and intimidate, but then fell back on the US.
There is no doubt that Tump and Putin are obnoxious authoritarians. But we should not gloss over of the imperialist ambitions of the sometimes dysfunctional EU. Europe is not only the continent where the Enlightenment was born – it is also where the Holocaust occurred. Its big powers, England, France, Spain, Germany, engaged in the most brutal colonial policies. This legacy lives on in the way it allows thousands of migrants to die in the Mediterranean, even while bribing client states in Africa to keep them locked in. The reason why it has adopted Ukraine as its cause celebre is that it wants to expand eastwards to Russia borders. As this option does not exist for the Palestinians, they are condemned to hell.
Arms Profits
The only victors from the new war talk are the arms industry. Their shares and profits have gone through the roof, as the chart below indicates. Ultimately, their profits will be paid for by the blood of working people.
This is why People Before Profit has consistently opposes EU miliary re-armament and defends Irish neutrality.
