A New President, Neutrality and an EU Presidency: Ireland’s Defence Dilemma

Connolly, like outgoing President Micheal D Higgins, is a champion of Irish neutrality. It is difficult to say whether the surge in support for the left-wing president-elect Connolly is a one-off or indicative of a more decisive shift in Irish politics towards opposition parties like Sinn Féin, which adroitly backed the independent Connolly early in her campaign. But Brussels and the UK, with whom Ireland shares a Common Travel Area, should accelerate planning for what a Sinn Féin-led government within the next five years would mean for the EU and British-Irish security and defence cooperation.

Both outgoing President Higgins and president-elect Connolly, who will take office as Ireland’s tenth president on 11 November, have shown a consistent dislike of increased defence spending beyond equipping lightly armed peacekeepers for service with the UN. During a parliamentary debate last year, Connolly observed that, ‘Ireland will never be able to have an army. We do not need an army.’ She now finds herself as commander of chief of the Irish Defence Forces, including the Air Corps, the Naval Service and, as is its title, the Army.

Ireland's Defence

Relative to its economy and population, Ireland spends the least on defence within the EU – Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Micheál Martin’s government allocated €1.35 billion for defence in 2025. Connolly remains alarmed, however, warning that Ireland, like other European countries, is in danger of ‘spending more money on arms and militarisation while we reduce the money spent on welfare’. (In reality, social welfare spending in Ireland has risen exponentially over the last decade.)

When asked about the war in Ukraine, Catherine Connolly condemned Russia’s invasion but also criticised NATO ‘warmongering’ before the conflict began. She praised left-wing pro-Brexit campaigner and academic, Chris Bickerton, in the aftermath of the 2016 UK referendum and voted against the Lisbon and Nice Treaties of the EU. She has also strongly condemned the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy and described Ireland’s engagement with NATO under its Partnership for Peace programme as ‘a travesty of the English language because it is a partnership for war’. All these statements are at odds with the policies of the Irish government.

The formal powers of the Irish government, not the president, to set and implement policy are unambiguously guaranteed by the constitution. Nonetheless, Catherine Connolly takes office at a time when there is a growing interest in Brussels and among Ireland’s neighbours, about the preparedness of Ireland to play its role in the defence of Europe, especially when it comes to protecting critical infrastructure in Ireland’s extensive marine territory – an area of 880,000 km2. And President Connolly’s stated views on defence and the military are very much at odds with those of the Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael-led coalition government. Her comments do not go unnoticed in other European capitals where there are fears that a future left-wing, Sinn Féin-led government in Ireland may complicate attempts to deepen European defence integration.

The president can refer legislation passed by the Oireachtas (Parliament) to the Supreme Court if he or she is concerned that a law may be unconstitutional. Successive government have, however, tended to resent the rare exercise of this power by presidents. In 1976, at the height of the Troubles, President Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh resigned after his decision to send the Emergency Powers Bill in 1976 to the Supreme Court – the legislation was upheld – was sharply criticised by the then minister of defence.

Ó Dálaigh’s views on the government’s security policy were not well-known to the public; indeed, his referral of legislation came as an unwelcome surprise to the government. Five decades later, there are no such doubts about the views held by outgoing President Michael D Higgins on foreign and defence policy. He has condemned increased defence spending in Ireland and in Europe, criticising what he sees as the Irish government’s ‘drift’ away from neutrality.

Successive Irish governments have avoided directly rebuking the ever-popular Higgins. The convention of presidential silence on policy matters, not contradicting or condemning the government, is an informal one. President Higgins has been quick to point to Ireland’s colonial past as a reason why the country finds military alliances, including with former imperial powers, especially repellent. Others in the EU – especially in countries bordering Russia – listen to criticisms in Ireland, one of the EU’s richest member states, and hear hubris borne out of privilege. The former Estonian former president Toomas Hendrik Ilves responded to President Higgins’ criticism of increased NATO defence spending after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, asking, ‘Do these people have any sense of self-awareness, their privileged geography or the appropriateness of even commenting as the beneficiary of implicit Nato security?’

Mr Ilves is a social democrat. So too is President Higgins and Catherine Connolly. Their former party, Labour, is part of the Socialists and Democrats grouping in the European Parliament. Most European social democrats support increased defence spending. Yet the Irish left is persistently critical of the EU when it comes to defence. President Higgins has continued to lambast what he terms ‘the fading imperial powers’ within the EU since the start of the war in Ukraine. Last year, Labour’s sole MEP in Brussels, Aodhán Ó Riordán, voted for an EU package of support for Ukraine, but attached an ‘explanation’ of his vote in which he objected to the call for member states to increase defence spending, pointing out that he was ‘a firm supporter of Irish neutrality’. (Unlike in neutral Switzerland and increasingly in Austria, some on the left in Ireland appear to believe that neutrality is somehow improved rather than endangered by correspondingly low levels of investment in the military.)

Neutrality in Perspective

There was a time when Ireland did not want to be regarded as a ‘non-aligned’ country. In the mid-1970s, during negotiations over what later became the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the Irish government insisted that it was ‘aligned’ to the West and so was not initially designated by that organisation as a neutral state. Since then, Irish neutrality has evolved into an unquestioned totem of the state rather than a government policy that can be regularly reviewed and if necessary jettisoned should it no longer serve Ireland’s interests. Confusingly, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence, Simon Harris, speaks warmly about Ireland’s ‘allies’ but insists that Ireland is ‘unaligned’ and neutral. No Irish political party of any size advocates membership of NATO. Nor does any party openly state that Ireland is ‘aligned’ in Europe, not least through its EU Common Security and Defence Policy commitments. On European defence and Ukraine, the government repeats the mantra that Ireland is ‘not politically neutral, but we are militarily neutral’, which appears to suffice for many at home but sows confusion in Brussels.

As president, Catherine Connolly has said that she will stand up for neutrality, especially the legislative ‘triple lock’, a mechanism which requires, government, parliamentary and UN approval before a contingent of the Irish Defence Forces are deployed to take part in operations overseas. Micheál Martin’s government wants to get rid of the UN approval ‘lock’, citing persistent vetoing of UN Security Council resolutions by Russia and China. The debate over the ‘triple lock’ has been the predominant topic of defence discussion in recent months.

While Ireland debates its neutrality and the triple-lock, much of the rest of Europe is preparing for the prospect of a major war with Russia. In recent months there have been repeated Russian incursions into Ireland’s maritime Economic Exclusion Zone, including spy ships suspected of gathering intelligence on subsea cables – nearly 75% of international subsea cables pass through or close to Irish waters. The Irish Naval Service has at times only been able to deploy a single patrol vessel on operations, due to a shortage in personnel.

Defensive Requirements

Ireland will need help policing its extensive marine territory, and there are some encouraging signs that Dublin is building the partnerships to deter future hostile state activity in Irish waters. Ireland is a participant in the Common Intelligence Sharing Environment initiative and has joined the EU’s Permanent Structured Cooperation project on critical seabed infrastructure protection. Earlier this month, Dutch and German naval vessels, part of Standing NATO Maritime Group One, conducted exercises with the Irish Naval Service. Ireland will, however, require even closer bilateral cooperation with the UK if recent Russian incursions are to be deterred or defended against in the future. The memorandum of understanding on defence between both countries is now over a decade old – there is an opportunity to put more structures in place to improve response times to threats and carry out more joint patrolling, especially in the Irish Sea and off Ireland’s north-west coast. Ireland is also well-placed to deepen the UK’s foreign policy, defence and security engagement with Brussels during its presidency of the EU next year.

To do all this, and to improve Ireland’s vulnerable cyber defences, Micheál Martin’s government needs to underline that it is urgently in Ireland’s interests to work with other European democracies to keep critical infrastructure, energy and communications, secure from interference and disruption by hostile states. Irish military and intelligence community leaders should also be allowed to intermittently make public their general assessments of evolving threats to national security.

The Irish left and Catherine Connolly are badly out of step with much of Europe. Ireland’s defence vulnerabilities and contradictions – not least between the head of state and the government – will come into focus during its presidency of the EU next year. At some point, rather than ignore criticisms and chiding from its head of state, the Irish government may have to forcefully make the case for why her views are so damaging to the protection of European freedoms that Ireland claims to cherish.

© Edward Burke, 2025, published by RUSI with permission of the author.

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