There’s a very interesting article in today’s Irish Times. The man’s name is Philip Quinlivan, and the articled is titled (in the IT sprawling headline style) “If we are not prepared to defend ourselves we should outsource our security. The writer used to be in the Irish army and has since left and is a management consultant. He raises two questions: does the south of Ireland need a defence force and if so, who should do the defending?
Regarding the latter question, he raises the question that many big organisations ask themselves: should we do this ourselves or should we out-source it? Almost in passing, he notes “We already have an agreement of sorts in place with the RAF to secure our skies”. I didn’t know that. Did you?
“Are we a serious State that ought to be defended? Do we need a national defence and security policy as well as a coherent foreign policy?”
He assumes that the answer to the above two questions is Yes. I’m not so sure.
Irish people need to ask themselves “Who would want to invade us?” I can’t think of any country that would be interested in doing such a thing, except they were invading Britain and saw the south of Ireland as a dangerous back door. If that were the case, why not hand the whole caboodle of defence over to the Brits, not just control of the skies? I feel pretty confident that most Irish people would instinctively recoil from that movement.
While some may be impressed by gallant little Ukraine and its defence against the much strong Russia, the south of Ireland would need to have armed forces trained to an astonishingly high level to have any hope of repulsing any country that might want to invade it in the twenty-first century.
So while there are flaws in the assumption the writer of the article makes – that an Irish defence force is advisable – its central flaw is one shared by many south of the border. The author talks as though the North literally doesn’t exist. At no point is there an acknowledgement that we have already been invaded, some hundreds of years ago, and that a significant part of Ireland remains in that invaded condition, with the invading country making the big decisions about how the North must conduct itself.
I’m not for a moment suggesting that Irish defence forces should cross the border and try to take northern towns and cities.What I am saying is that, like most southern politicians and a considerable number of southern people, the north may exist but it’s seen as not really part of Ireland. Not part of the normal Ireland.
If we consider the south alone, a defence force is useless because it has no one to defend against, yet billions of euros get directed its way, which in addition to being pointless is expensive. Should the south then join NATO or an EU army? I don’t think it should: instead it should be providing a model for the world, how political differences can be addressed without descent into the pit of violence.
But above all it should give a lead by openly acknowledging that a sizeable part of Ireland remains under British rule, and that we want to ‘defend’ our country by having the cojones to acknowledge that it remains partially invaded and that we are using maximum political strategies to remedy that situation.
And remember: every time we refer to the south or the north as ‘a country’ rather than a state, we too are pretending that Ireland was not and does not remain invaded.
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