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.
In an increasingly interconnected world, the seamless flow of information across continents is vital to the functioning of modern economies and societies. For Ireland, a small but globally connected nation, transatlantic cables are the lifelines that enable communication, commerce, and connectivity with the rest of the world. These undersea cables, which carry vast amounts of data between North America and Europe, are critical to Ireland’s digital infrastructure. But what would happen if these cables were cut? The repercussions would be far-reaching, affecting everything from business operations to everyday life for Irish citizens.
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Comments
By TulliusCicero 2025-12-0621:113 reply 100% agreed with this article. The whole idea of Ireland's supposed neutrality is a farce. Does anyone really think that if a country like Russia decided to full-on invade Ireland, other European nations would just shrug it off? Of course not, and the Irish are well aware of that and rely on it (already they explicitly rely on the UK to help defend their country as a matter of policy).
So really it's a simple hypocrisy, a one-way street. You help us, but we don't help you. We're too principled to help others, you see.
Nearly Everything consequential in history was unexpected, and for the most part we have a record of someone important saying "that will never happen"
By throw310822 2025-12-0621:482 reply There's also a long history of tragic events happening precisely because everyone was preparing for them (see: WWI) and of course, of horribly wrong choices getting prepared for things that never happened.
WW1 wasn’t “started by preparation”. In fact it was the continuation of about 100 years of war, and the war continued for nearly 100 years afterward. Europe had been at war nearly continuously from Napoleon to 2000 .
Interesting! What are some battles of this war between 1946 to 2000, and what happened in 2000 to stop it?
Soviet Occupation of Europe, "Cold War", which was very hot with arms race, intel, nuclear deployments, naval skirmishes, proxy wars, Yugoslavia War.
It didn't end in 2000, really it expanded.
By throw310822 2025-12-0718:103 reply The partition of Europe between the two victors of WW2 (USA and USSR) was part of the peace, not a state of war. The cold war wasn't a war inside Europe but between two rival superpowers; the Yugoslavia war wasn't one between EU countries but a civil war result of a change in external conditions.
By tonymet 2025-12-0721:02 If you're living under an occupied military force, you are still at war, not peace.
By tonymet 2025-12-0720:58 it wasn't partitioned. USSR invaded and captured that territory in 1939. It was an agreement with Hitler, not Roosevelt.
Yalta happened well after everyone had been killed and the dust settled. Roosevelt chickened out.
Go visit the Occupation museum in Riga for the actual history, instead of reading US text books.
By tonymet 2025-12-0720:59 And Stalin continued to take territory even later, moving into East Germany, Czechoslovakia, etc . Continuing with military pressure over the later years.
By tonymet 2025-12-0717:23 you're kidding right.
By spwa4 2025-12-088:58 ... and an equally long history of people "avoiding war", while refusing to be reasonable, right up to the point that a gigantic war becomes unavoidable. People will choose to go to war over a prolonged economic crisis. Such a crisis can easily be avoided by countries working together rather than push costs onto each other, but in any actual crisis they never do cooperate.
And of course, WWII would be an example of that. It was also far worse than WWI, including for Ireland. So there's even a very strong case that this is a self-destructive attitude for Ireland.
But if history teaches us anything, whether the example of the Weimar republic or anything else, it's that you can tell people this all you want. You can show how bad things are and how the situation cannot continue, people will NEVER accept what needs to be done, if it has to be done by them.
For example, right now it's pretty damn obvious European shared military presence in the East Sea and in Eastern European countries is a very desirable thing indeed. Every other EU country, and several others like Switzerland, have committed to put forward about 5% of GDP towards this (>10% of their total government budget) ... so it would seem only fair Ireland joins them, after all, without that presence Ireland's economy cannot keep working, because it cannot export or import freely. Ireland is letting other people pay for its safety, giving nothing in return, but Ireland is competing with them for the rewards of that safety. And your very comment shows that you're arguing to not do it, illustrating the problem. Of course, profiting economically of other countries while abandoning them militarily is exactly why Russia (and even China) think they can just conquer them. If that happens, it would be a total disaster for Ireland. But nobody cares.
And of course, Ireland is not currently in an economic crisis, quite the opposite, and could easily cooperate ... but doesn't. We can only imagine what will happen when inevitably, a crisis does come.
In fact Ireland currently has tax laws that let it essentially tax all of Europe (letting the FANG companies take profits out of Europe tax-free in return for jobs in Ireland, that are then heavily taxed by the Irish government. The employees of those companies are heavily taxed, btw, NOT the companies themselves). That's what the current Irish government actually prides itself on. Stealing tax revenue from it's main allies. Seriously.
So just so we're clear: Ireland is destroying corporate tax income in 30 EU countries, in trade for jobs, not filled by Irish people, in Dublin, so those can be taxed at >50%. This is, by the way, what the Irish government prides itself on, and it is why living in Dublin has basically become impossibly expensive.
It is also forcing the EU tax system to become 10x more complicated than it already is (the EU is working to have multinationals pay taxes in the countries where they make money, so any advantage of having a tax domicile in a specific country disappears. But of course, this will be complicated, to put it mildly)
Except the Irish army has conducted large numbers of peacekeeping missions as part of the United Nations. Irish soldiers have died in said operations. The Siege at Jadotville is one example - there is a pretty great film about this.
By TulliusCicero 2025-12-0621:30 That's laudable, but it doesn't change the fact that they rely on their European neighbors to defend them while feigning "neutrality" and wouldn't return the favor if another, say, EU country were seriously attacked.
By spwa4 2025-12-088:46 Like preventing the Hezbollah attack on Israel for example. And yes, an Irish soldier died. Pte Rooney.
I hope the other missions went better ...
Btw: Lebanon convicted someone to a death sentence over this killing. He wasn't in court however and the conviction remains without any actual consequence for the killer, he hasn't ever been arrested. The Irish government had no reaction, other than hiding that this happened, and that nobody was actually punished is not well known in Ireland.
By nradov 2025-12-0621:51 The Irish were idiots for sending peacekeepers there without adequate air, armor, and artillery support.
By throw310822 2025-12-0621:343 reply If Russia decided to full-on invade Ireland, a country of 4.5 million (as completely absurd as this idea is, being Ireland where it is) having its own military would not help Ireland- it should better capitulate quickly to limit damage.
By TulliusCicero 2025-12-0621:352 reply There's a similar population ratio between the PRC and Taiwan I believe, so I guess Taiwan should just give up on having a military entirely then?
Not possible for them to stop China, so why bother? Just lie back and think of Ireland.
Russia invading Ireland would be like China invading Cuba.. there's a geo in geopolitics for a reason..
Would it not be more like Russia invading Königsberg?
By Ekaros 2025-12-0621:55 Well if they had reached Atlantic before that...
By throw310822 2025-12-0621:42 If Taiwan weren't defended by the US (for purely strategic interests, certainly not because of idealism or democracy) then yes, sure. Better than a destructive war with the same identical outcome.
Btw, do you also happen to think that Ireland should arm itself against a possible invasion from the US?
By tim333 2025-12-079:57 Ireland mostly managed to kick out the British.
What? The very distance involved and difficulty of such an invasion is precisely why resistance is extremely plausible and not being able to do so is indefensible. Even a "token" amount of resistance makes it exponentially more difficult.
You would certainly have been the type of person whining about how Ukraine was doomed to fall in a matter of hours under the incredible size and capability of the Russian military. Like, these guys are just not that competent. You can make the job nearly impossible for them by just giving a single solitary fuck.
To say nothing of the fact that "full invasion" isn't even really the target. They just need to be able to defend their own airspace and sea lanes against errant Russian planes and ships.
By throw310822 2025-12-0621:591 reply > The very distance involved and difficulty of such an invasion is precisely why resistance is extremely plausible
Not to mention the possibility of an invasion from Australia. They should prepare against that, too! See, the whole premise of this discussion is completely absurd: there is no threat whatsoever by Russia to Ireland. There's a narrative that gets pushed more every day that Europe is under threat from Russia and should gear up for a war, and even (say some) attack first. Notice that all the drones spotted above airports and military installations are only alleged to belong to Russia, but not a single one has been reasonably attributed to them. And the party that has most to gain from an increase in the tension between Europe and Russia is Ukraine, not Russia.
> You would certainly have been the type of person whining about how Ukraine was doomed to fall
And I was right, as it seems, hundreds of thousands of deaths later, cities razed to the ground, a country in ruins. Those who didn't want peace talks share in part the responsibility of those deaths, do you ever think about it?
Perhaps you missed the confirmed Russian spy boat surveying cables going into Dublin?
They’re not doing that because they want to give out free hugs.
https://www.rte.ie/news/primetime/2024/1115/1481145-russian-...
By throw310822 2025-12-0713:211 reply A closely surveilled Russian vessel that was briefly seen several kms away from undersea cables. Meanwhile, the only confirmed hostile act against European infrastructure was the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, and the perpetrators were our "allies", Ukraine and the US.
By Lio 2025-12-089:22 We don't know who the perpetrators were. There's speculation that it was carried out by Russia itself.
Your blaming it on Ukraine and US without proof, much like your suggestions that Ukraine should surrender to stop the war, is suspcious.
Face facts, Russia could stop the war anytime they like because they started it. Where as for Ukraine surrending doesn't stop the mass killings or the kidnapping of their children.
We know that because in areas that have been conquered by Russia these things have continued.
No, they need to be able to defend their elections and social media from Russian interference.
By throw310822 2025-12-0622:08 It would be time that people take responsibility again for their own (and their countries') choices instead of blaming everything wrong on the mythical bogeyman Russia.
Ireland having 0 military capabilities, and being completely dependent on NATO, while being extremely opinionated, on how and what NATO does, always irked me deeply.
By culi 2025-12-0621:50 Ireland doesn't have exactly zero military capabilities. For example they have a military base in Lebanon. They have a decades long solidarity with Hezbollah and solidarity demonstrations are commonplace
https://rebelbreeze.com/2024/09/21/dublin-demonstration-in-s...
By happytoexplain 2025-12-0621:451 reply The implication that having military strength is a prerequisite for having opinions about international policy is horrifying.
By missedthecue 2025-12-0621:463 reply No offense but how is that not obvious by second grade. Don't have a big mouth if you don't have a big stick too. Ireland doesn't have quiet opinions, but a rather big mouth about other nations' foreign policy.
At my school there were a lot of big mouths and no big sticks. Non armed debate is a thing.
By missedthecue 2025-12-0622:401 reply "Armed debate" is a misread. The point of my comment was that there is little sympathy for people that bite the hand that feeds them or talk themselves into situations they don't have the wherewithal to navigate.
By happytoexplain 2025-12-0919:41 Biting the hand that feeds is a nonsense characterization of disagreeing - even loudly - with the person who aids you. We do not own each other, as much as many of us would like to.
By pixl97 2025-12-0623:23 >Non armed debate is a thing
Until your mouth writes a check that your ass can't cash.
By Lio 2025-12-0810:06 In your school. Where the kids were looked after by the teachers.
By jaredklewis 2025-12-0623:151 reply We can try having a non-armed debate with Putin, but I don’t think it’s going to be very productive.
By tim333 2025-12-0623:33 Not that I'm recommending it but Putin's regime seems to behave much like the mafia and will get along with people who pay it protection money or ally with it.
By happytoexplain 2025-12-0919:39 You're absolutely right that this immoral principle applies in second grade. But humans advance from that point, not stagnate (often).
By throw310822 2025-12-0622:161 reply I find this position abject, but I'm curious what opinions are you talking about specifically. Can you elaborate?
By missedthecue 2025-12-0622:391 reply Sure they have very extreme opinions about the Ukraine situation that they make very clear at every EU parliament meeting.
By throw310822 2025-12-0623:111 reply Can you point me to some examples? I have not followed closely but it seems that Ireland is on the same page as the other EU states in regards to supporting Ukraine.
I'm also curious about what you consider a "very extreme opinion" to be in this regard.
By missedthecue 2025-12-073:311 reply Here is a specific example where an Irish MEP specifically speaks against sanctions on Russia and against NATO donating any weapons to Ukraine in front of the EU parliament.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpieZnTQorQ
Here is a different Irish MEP saying similar things.
By throw310822 2025-12-075:03 They are two MPs, they can say whatever they want. Sadly they don't reflect the position of Ireland, and I hope you are not trying to say that Ireland or Europe should abolish their internal democracy.
I say "sadly" because they're perfectly right. Daly: "the more arms you pump into Ukraine, the more the war will be prolonged, and the more Ukrainians will die [...] We will sit down with Russia, there will be a negotiated peace and this organisation should promote it earlier".
She said this three years ago: in the meanwhile hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians have died, Ukraine has lost its territory anyway, we are sitting down with Russia and there is going to be a negotiated peace, and Europe is not part of it because it was never able to promote any diplomacy. Time proved her right on all points.
By reorder9695 2025-12-0621:223 reply Ireland doesn't have 0 military capabilities, they have enough of a military to conduct peacekeeping missions elsewhere, which they don't need to do. They just don't have the ability to defend an invasion, but they do certainly have a military that does good in the world.
Ireland have an army with no tanks and an air force with no jets.
How would they maintain peace in another country without the help of others
By Gud 2025-12-0719:33 Who said without others? You don't need tanks for peacekeeping missions. Or jets for that matter. FWIW I was in Kosovo and served in a multionational task force including the Irish.
they were based next to some chicken farm, lord knows why, you could smell them from miles away, if you were unlucky.
By nradov 2025-12-0621:46 OK so their capability isn't precisely 0, but it rounds to 0.
Their "peacekeeping" missions are somewhere between utterly impotent / useless and actively counterproductive. Playing dumb and doing nothing while Hezbollah uses you as cover to launch missiles over the border from a couple hundred meters away is not keeping the peace.
Yeah, didn't they completely fail at stopping hezbollah from rebuilding, right in their backyard?
That assumes that their mission is to stop anything. UNRWA's sole mission (like most large-scale nonprofits - not suggesting they're unique) is to continue to procure money for its 30,000 or so salaried posts.
By C6JEsQeQa5fCjE 2025-12-071:181 reply Additionally, it assumes that the Irish, who broadly as a people support national liberation movements, would even want to prevent Hezbollah from rebuilding, even if they could.
I mean what they think is somewhat irrelevant here, their UN mission was to stop terrorists from rebuilding, and utterly failed.
By C6JEsQeQa5fCjE 2025-12-0715:511 reply The UN does not consider Hezbollah to be a terrorist organization, so that could not have been their UN mission.
By dralley 2025-12-0722:20 Seems like a failing of the UN, if true.
By TulliusCicero 2025-12-0621:134 reply Ireland nobly took a stand against fighting the Nazis in WW2, and they've been similarly brave ever since.
Notably thousands of Irish soldiers did fight the Germans in WW2 but via joining the British Army... an act that was frowned upon at the times. Many were killed.
And when they came back, they were blacklisted by order of the government:
By TMWNN 2025-12-076:51 I had heard of the blacklist, but thought that it was for those who deserted the Irish military to join the British. Punishing deserters is understandable, no matter the motive.
That said, if I understand the article correctly, those who did this were punished worse than deserters who did not go fight?!?
By spwa4 2025-12-0720:15 A lot of governments took the side of the Nazis. Including the EU's founder, Robert Schuman, ex-Nazi collaborator of the French Vichy government. But that is nothing compared to many others.
Things get so much worse. The Dutch Child protection agency has in it's historical archives, not just that they collaborated with implementing the holocaust against children, but actually organized it. Jewish (and various other groups, like Romani) children were "invited" to summer camps, that turned out to be death camps (and the "east front", which you also didn't return from). They even set a trap to deport Jewish and mentally and physically disabled children to extermination camps, including a number of their own personnel, and even went so far as to hunt their own personnel that "chose the side of the children".
Austrian child protection agency selected children to be sent to death camps. That, Austrian psychiatry before and during the holocaust, is where Autism comes from. The first children diagnosed with Autism were not just sent to death camps, that was the only purpose of the diagnosis of Autism. To mark the child for death to "protect (something about race that I will not repeat)".
In case you ever wonder why the child protection agencies of those countries still reserve the right to lie about the death of children, even today, that is why. Because both mass-murdered children out of racism, and if a concrete case, of which there are many, were to come to court even today ...
And yet, it gets worse. And extremely confusing. Many things boil down to what everybody actually kind of knows. Ideas, especially implemented on the scale of a state, come from a long history and trials. Everything around WW2 was, justly and correctly, blamed on the Nazis. Nazis did those things. But they got the idea, and in many cases personnel, from somewhere. And a LOT of groups have used that to absolve themselves of what they did before, often long before, WW2. Look up "industrial psychiatry" sometime.
By TulliusCicero 2025-12-0621:231 reply I don't dispute that there are many brave individual Irish people of course, but in terms of the country as a whole in matters of policy...
By beezlewax 2025-12-079:47 You were about to refer to a specific policy you disagreed with or...?
Well, one can look at this as at least a step in the right direction, compared to the active collaboration with Germany during WW1 by the people who became Irish government by the time of WW2 arrived.
By jltsiren 2025-12-0623:13 The two world wars were not the same. WW1 was a stupid war that happened for stupid reasons, and there were no real moral differences between the sides. Many nations tried to use the war as an opportunity for independence by collaborating with the opposing side. Some of them were successful.
In Finland, we still call infantry Jägers in honor of those who went to Germany to receive military training and to fight against Russia.
By TheGuyWhoCodes 2025-12-0715:13 They also offered condolences to the Nazis when Hitler offed himself.
By TulliusCicero 2025-12-0621:333 reply > Ireland chose to take a position against colonialism
By refusing to fight the Nazis? What?
Are you implying that the Allies were the colonizers in WW2? (The Allied countries were also colonizers obviously, but within WW2 it's pretty obvious which countries were doing more of that, and more aggressively)
By jonplackett 2025-12-0621:55 Britain was still literally an empire at this point, currently colonising India and many other places.
You can say they should fight the nazis anyway but making the argument that they should do this because Britain weren’t colonisers doesn’t make sense.
What was a tiny, broke, agrarian country just out of a civil war that was still simmering going to do about the Nazis?
They had a well-justified disdain for being pulled into the British orbit. They chose neutrality.
Do you hold Switzerland and Sweden to the same standard?
If Britain were to join in a conflict with Russia over Ukraine, would you expect Indian soldiers to rally to the cause of their former King and Country?
If you’re an American, would you be in favor of providing VA benefits to US Army soldiers who deserted and joined the Ukrainian army?
Dunno about deserting to join the Ukrainian army but they seem ok with leaving the US military and joining the Ukrainian army. See Malcolm Nance for example.
By TMWNN 2025-12-076:53 Nance had been retired from the US military for two decades when he joined the Ukrainian military.
Ireland's position at the time (before they got images of concentration and elimination camps) was that what the Nazi did was no different than what colonial powers did during 200 years.
And since the Nazis invented the concentration camps in Mozambique and Namibie (taking example from Belgium) around 1909, i'd say they weren't that wrong.
By Spooky23 2025-12-0623:18 The Germans in Africa were cruel and inhumane. But the concentration camp and modern military campaigns targeting civilian populations were not something alien to the British.
Most well documented was in the Boer war:
https://theconversation.com/concentration-camps-in-the-south...
Ireland is usually underplayed and less clearly linked to government policy as much of the dirty work was done by private entities. You’re not likely familiar with Cromwell’s invasion, the Ulster Plantation or the famine… but the Irish were. Cromwell’s actions and later events resulted in the death of 10+% of the population. The famine resulted in the death of 10% and emigration of 10% of the population. That’s a lot of dead Irish and deeply affected these leaders.
I’m not defending Nazis or on some insane rant about Britain. I just think you need to judge decisions in context of the times.
By antonymoose 2025-12-0623:221 reply The Nazis we’re not in power in 1909… stepping beyond that fact, my understanding is that the British pioneered the technique during the Boer Wars…
By orwin 2025-12-070:15 But many of the nazis in power in 36 did their first experimentations in the colonies. And by the way, in 33, one of the first act of Nazi germany was the sterilization of black and multiracial children.
You know, there’s something to be said for Ireland’s attitude. The other islands (ha!) and the continent have treated them as second-class chattel for centuries, while competing amongst themselves for global hegemony. Better to stay out of that game and sort their own business, many of them think.
>Better to stay out of that game
The Russians are making incursions into Irish waters and airspace, it's just a brute fact. So either they play the game, or Britain plays it for them. They don't get to sit aloof above it all, that's not how reality works.
They are a protectorate in all but name, it's disgraceful.
By AlexandrB 2025-12-0621:30 Canada is in a similar situation. A lot of high-minded talk about peacekeeping and neutrality, but constantly benefitting from being implicitly protected by US defence policy. The real test will come if/when Russia decides to challenge Canadian arctic sovereignty.
By TulliusCicero 2025-12-0621:251 reply Ireland literally has a policy of relying on the UK to defend them.
I assume you're referring to the 1952 agreement that the RAF is allowed to intercept unidentified or hostile aircraft in Irish airspace?
That's because the UK does not want Ireland to have an army. Ireland has a long history of standing with Native Americans, Palestinians, and other groups facing colonization. They even have a military base in Lebanon and a very long standing partnership with Hezbollah (Hezbollah was born out of the struggle to take back the bottom third of their country that was occupied by the US and Israel so they are often seen as an anti-colonial movement).
Ireland having any sort of military capacities would directly contradict UK military interests.
By dingaling 2025-12-077:37 > Ireland having any sort of military
> capacities would directly contradict
> UK military interests.
Contradicted by the fact that the Irish military forces were entirely equipped with UK-supplied aircraft and vehicles until the 1960s, at which point Ireland turned towards France instead.
The UK never intervened to prevent Ireland acquiring any weapon system, in contrast it was Irish budget frugality that consistently undermined the military.
At present Ireland is considering the purchase of Gripen interceptors, and the UK seems at worst indifferent and probably actually quite relieved.
