Odd how headlines get chosen. I would have thought that what might well have been an assassination attempt on President Zelensky as he flew into Ireland on December 2 would have shaken the world. Seemingly, four hostile drones that were sent to intercept his plane as it arrived in Dublin, but missed him because, perhaps for the first time in many years, a plane arrived at Dublin early: Namely, his. The drones then went off to buzz what was reported as an Irish Navy ship, but it was actually rather more than that: It was, in effect, the entire Irish Navy.
But far from shaking the world, this incident barely shook the Irish media, which are so used to Ireland’s inability to defend itself that they can no longer recognise a big story, even after it circled Dublin Airport and then circled the entire Irish fleet of one warship. I say warship in the kindest possible way: It does not have the electronic means to engage a drone, and – unlike the French navy protecting a submarine headquarters recently – declined to open fire on the drones, even with its single machine gun.
Here is the Big Story. Three and a half years into the largest land war in Europe in eighty years, the EU is still incapable of mastering its own skies or protecting not even a VIP, but a SIP: A supremely important person. So what killer-weapon does the EU have at its disposal? Yes, the Eurovision Song Contest, which Ireland, Spain, Slovakia and Norway are boycotting next year because Israel has not been expelled from it. Most of us know that Israel is not in Europe. Nor is Australia, and by a slightly larger margin, yet for some perplexing reason, it does participate in the Eurovision Song Contest,
However, since most of the EU is A) in the EU and B) in the European Broadcasting Union, maybe there is confluence of the two? Not so: Also included in the EBU are Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia. Happily – though perhaps tragically for that region’s many gays – these countries are not in Eurovision. But then nor are they expected to defend Europe. That’s Europe’s job, and it’s a job that Europe still steadfastly refuses to do, even to the point of not creating the civil infrastructure that would enable the EU to fight a future war. Ukraine’s remarkable ability to transform its society into a formidable fighting machine, able to hold off the might of Russia, has not in any degree been emulated by EU countries. It’s as if Crimea had never been invaded and annexed by Russia over a decade ago.
The day should have long since gone that a member of the EU could not merely choose not to defend itself but could denounce other countries’ willingness and capacity to do so for their own territories. Yet that is precisely what Ireland’s newly-elected President Connolly did on her election campaign, comparing Germany’s radical transformation of both attitude and defence spending to the early days of the Third Reich. If, after over fifty years of membership of the EU, Ireland does not think it is obliged to defend the Union in any shape or form, and moreover feels free to denounce countries that take their defence seriously, what precisely is the meaning of the “U” in EU? Ununited?
Culturally, it is quite clear that there is no union qua union, as the recent debate in Dublin City Council over the possible “denaming” of Chaim Herzog Park, originally named after the Irish-born Israeli statesman. One councillor, Ciarán Ó Meachair of the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, declared that Chaim Herzog had commanded troops who “raped, murdered and pillaged innocent civilians”. Councillor John Lyons of the Labour Group said that Herzog had forcibly expelled 200,000 Palestinians from Jerusalem into Jordan. Conor Reddy, while rejecting charges of anti-Semitism, declared that the entire debate on the issue “calls into question the entire project of Zionism and shows that the state of Israel itself is illegitimate”.
Not merely are these anti-Semitic fictions, they could be uttered without fear of rebuke from either Ireland’s government or even apparently from Ursula von der Leyen. Free speech is free speech, to be sure, but it works in both directions. The utterance of such neo-Nazi sentiments from the EU’s volitionally undefended margins surely merits fierce reproval from its centre, especially since the Irish government stayed silent even after those dreadful remarks in Dublin City Council became available on-line.
Nobody could fail to be appalled at the destruction done to Gaza: But that was the outcome intended by Hamas when it launched its brilliantly evil pogrom two years ago last October. As the Israeli journalist Avi Mayer pointed out: “There are any number of (European) countries that are engaged in wars, territorial disputes, alleged violations of human rights…there’s Turkey, which is engaged in several territorial disputes simultaneously. There’s Azerbaijan, Armenia, Greece; Cyprus has a territorial dispute. Those countries aren’t being banned… Somehow, that opprobrium is only targeted at the Jewish State. So, it causes many Israelis to wonder why is it that only the Jewish State is subjected [to this]?”
Ignorance of the reality of war facilitates the infantilisation of Irish feelings about Gaza, which the former Irish Minister for Justice Michael McDowell referred to several years ago when he spoke of “now malleable Irish public opinion and folk memory can be”. But this is probably true of many societies as the protection of the US military and nuclear umbrella has similarly protected the populations of Europe from contemplation of what modern war can be like. Eighty years ago last February, the RAF fire-bombed the sleepy and undefended town of Pforzheim, and in the space of just two hours killed (or burnt alive) some 17,400 civilians, most of them women, children and old people. It is good that Europe no longer has any understanding of what war is like, though it cannot possibly be good that its safest country, untroubled by foreign wars throughout over a century of its independence, feels free to scold a country that has never known a single day’s peace since 1948.
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.
Merz can look West, look East, or look at the moon, Germany is hammered