There is a long-standing “secret defence agreement” in place between the UK and its European Union neighbour Ireland, according to a former Irish Government minister.
Willie O’Dea, who served as defence minister between 2004 and 2010, has described the apparently clandestine arrangement between the two countries as “going back decades”.
In an Irish Times report, O’Dea said the UK has largely been in charge of monitoring Ireland’s territorial skies, with Dublin lacking the equipment to detect potentially hostile aircraft.
“Not that we were under any sort of threat but alien aircraft that shouldn’t have been up there … the [UK’s] RAF usually informed the Irish Government about that because of an arrangement that’s been long-standing for a long time,” the former minister said.
Asked whether he knew about what was going on in Irish airspace during his time as minister, O’Dea said: “I didn’t know, quite frankly, because we didn’t have the technology to tell us,” adding that being able to detect possibly hostile players over Ireland “didn’t seem particularly important at the time”.
O’Dea is reportedly the first minister to go public regarding the arrangement, which has been described as an “open secret” among those in Ireland’s defence sector.
Ireland is not able to defend its own airspace, observers say, with its small Air Corps force not operating a single supersonic fighter-jet.
Instead, it relies on Pilatus PC-9 sub-sonic training aircraft equipped with machine guns, with the slow-moving fighter being compared by experts to planes flown during the Second World War.
Although O’Dea did admit that Irish threat-detection is handled by the RAF, he did not say whether the UK’s air force aircraft had permission to enter or defend Irish airspace.
The Irish Times has claimed that such permission is indeed in place and has been since 1952.
The deal between the UK and Ireland is said to have been repeatedly reworked over the past number of decades, despite concerns from Irish Government and military officials regarding both the legality and the practicality of the arrangement.
Their concerns were raised after the hush-hush deal was reworked in the wake of the 9/11 US terror attacks, with Irish officers worried that granting UK fighters permission to enter Irish airspace and shoot down hijacked aircraft could have disastrous consequences for those on the ground.
They were particularly fearful that if any terrorists controlling hijacked aircraft were confronted with RAF jets over Ireland they may want to “go in glory” and attempt to crash into Irish Government buildings, for example, even if their intended target was in the UK.
