The US Vice President JD Vance last week fired a warning shot for Europe’s benefit – not over its bows but deep into its rhetorical engine-room, where it keeps all its verbal pomp and pride. Europe’s leaders recoiled in shock at the “arrogance” of this nobody from Ohio lecturing them about anything. However, far from being a nobody, Vance is the travelling plenipotentiary of the most powerful man in the world. He is also from a state that has seen its economy hollowed out by jobs-emigration, while its white working classes have almost been destroyed by an opioid epidemic. He is not going to take lectures from anybody, least of all from the leaders of European states that have lived comfortably within the American imperium for the past eighty years, pampering their electorates with extravagant welfare states while American taxpayers were picking up the bill for defending those states.
No country in Europe embodies this parasitism as much as Ireland. Though on the continent’s western flank, with a million square kilometres of the Atlantic within its legal patrolling remit, it has not so much failed to live up to its obligations towards its fellow EU-members as steadfastly refused to do so. It has, for example, at any one time, just one sea-going naval-vessel available for patrolling an ocean-area the size of western Europe. In short, the Irish are the neighbours from hell, who don’t mow their lawn, who don’t repair their side of the partition fence and allow their unlicensed (and possibly rabid) dogs do their business in the children’s sandpit next door, before departing with some of the tastier infantile occupants clamped firmly in their jaws. Ireland’s military inertia is usually presented as a manifestation of its virtuous neutrality, whereas it is nothing more than a mixture of meanness, laziness and pathological immaturity.
This inability to discern and obey the definitions of modern statehood is almost total throughout Irish life. There is not a single TD (Irish for MP) who dissents from the suffocating consensus that Ireland is neutral, therefore has no enemies, and therefore does not need to have modern, well-equipped defence forces to protect its seas, skies and soil. Its well-stocked leftwing benches in the Dail (parliament) are especially keen to denounce as a war-monger anyone who wants to create a modern fighting army, an efficient air-defence system and a blue-water navy. That these benches include Sinn Fein, which was the political wing of the IRA during the 30-year-long Troubles that took thousands of lives, is a conundrum not amenable to the ordinary processes of reason. Nor is this other imponderable: the Irish government has had a secret deal with the British going back to the 1950s that the RAF will protect Irish skies. This is the same RAF that the Irish government would not permit even tiny territorial overflights in the protection of British soldiers on Border duty during the Troubles.
Perhaps no delinquency matches that of the Irish towards their seas, beneath which lie the transatlantic cables that make Ireland Inc. both a viable economic entity and essentially the operational headquarters of US capitalism in Europe. This enables it to have a vast trading surplus with the US, amounting to $87 billion last year. Yes, you read that aright: $87 billion. The Irish GDP has doubled in the past decade, making the Irish the richest people per capita in the EU. Yet Ireland nonetheless refuses to invest in the technology needed to protect its underwater nexus of cables. That is a duty left to the pathetic remains of the Royal Navy, which nowadays roughly compares with Kyrgyzstan’s ocean-going fleet, having more admirals than warships. (The complete collapse of British military power is another and perhaps even greater scandal, one that might share some common psychiatric explanation with Ireland’s, but that is another article for another day).
Simply, the Irish refuse to pay their way in the world. Last autumn, the Irish government announced that it would add another €100 million to the Irish Defence Budget, bringing it to just €1.35 billion. (Remember, Ireland’s trade surplus with the US is $87 billion, with the $ and the € roughly at parity). Okay, so €100 million is not exactly peanuts, is it? But actually, it is, because out of that must come the €50 million for a Dassault Falcon Executive jet to fly Irish politicians around the world, yes even non-stop to Hollywood where pressing business doubtless awaits at Oscars’ time, and this comes out of the defence budget, not the cabinet’s. Oh yes, plus a Airbus C295 maritime patrol/transport aircraft, which overall leaves a budgetary increase of roughly tuppence three farthings.
This historic apathy towards defence is combined with an adolescent emotional incontinence, so that last year the Dail voted to boycott Israeli industries in the West Bank, to recognise the non-existent and undefined state of Palestine and to broaden the definition of genocide to encompass whatever Israel has been doing in Gaza. This can only mean that freeing a hundred twenty-three Palestinian prisoners in exchange for every liberated Israeli hostage – as happened last weekend – is exactly the same as Auschwitz. And it is, it really is.
Meanwhile, the national vice of childishness has reduced the Irish Army to a tragedy inside a farce wrapped in a charade tied up with a travesty. Thirty years ago, the Irish Minister for Defence (without even consulting the chief of staff) announced that the Irish Army would henceforth be fully integrated, with men and women serving alongside one another in infantry battalions. Not even the Israelis have made this work, and the Irish certainly haven’t. The Irish Army is now in tatters with allegations rife about its rampant “rape-culture”. Though this is ludicrously untrue, it does seem that some drill sergeants might possibly have used the c-word in front of female recruits. These doughty she-warriors are being taught to bayonet the foe to death, to go on brutal night marches over mountain bog and glen, and dig latrines to squat over comprehensively, but the mere sound of the four-letter c-word is enough to demoralise these poor broken creatures, causing them to report sick and to sue for sexual harassment.
So, clearly, a case for Irish journalists to expose for all its absurdity, no? Not remotely. Irish journalists exult in allegations of “institutional misogyny” – women-hacks because they love victimhood, male because they are keen to show their she-comrades how right-on and cool they are and thereby possibly get them into their beds. Together they have confected the consensual falsehood that the Irish Defence Forces consist of misogynists and rapists, and must be reformed, top to bottom. Such nonsense could only occur in a society that does not take itself or its defences seriously – and why should it? Will not Uncle Sam, one way or another, come to the rescue?
Maybe, once upon a time, but not any longer. Why should the Irish, whose average income is now the highest in Europe, apart from perhaps Monte Carlo, expect the workers of the Pennsylvania-Ohio rustbelt and the miners scrabbling futilely at an exhausted Kentucky-coalface to pay for Ireland’s defences? Yet this obvious truth cuts no ice in Ireland. Most Irish people genuinely do not understand that an intrinsic and inviolable part of having your own country is that you spend a lot of money defending it, otherwise foreigners will help themselves to it, as happened to Ukraine. Yet when it did, the Irish Defence Minister Simon Coveney refused to arm the victim because the prospect of sending lethal weaponry that might be used against Russians, and yes, even hurt them – oh, howwid thought! – made him feel “uncomfortable”. That’s possibly how the Irish Minister For Being Nice To Cuddly Animals might have reacted on being asked to boil a tap-dancing vegetarian kitten alive in a vat of molten lead, but the Minister for Defence?
Naturally, he wasn’t sacked and Ireland duly sent bandages to Ukraine, which caused the Russian tanks to tear their hair out in terror and scamper, screaming, all the way back to Vladivostok. Or perhaps not. Yet this abject deal kept the Dail happy, presumably as a form of displacement activity to distract the TDs’ attention from the nasty bad world outside. But in that nasty had world is one Vladimir Putin, a psychopathic poisoner who makes Lucrezia Borgia at her vials seem like Mary Poppins sharing a bubble-bath with Doris Day. He also likes picking on the defenceless, which he thought Ukraine was, and discovering otherwise, promptly lost an entire army, including an airborne brigade of Spetsnaz assault troops. But as the war winds to its sordid conclusion and poor Ukraine counts its dead and its shattered cities, the bully Putin will probably want to make his final statement on the war, so who else to pick on? Ireland has no allies: after all, simper simper, we are neutral. So why would Putin, as a final rebuke to the EU, not inflict his revenge on the only country that is in the EU but not NATO?
Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.
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