The Kettle's Boyled: Are we ready for what comes next?
Irish Army Defence Forces in riot gear in training.
I have a few umbrellas, the one that came with my current car and the one that I forgot to leave in the car I traded in, as well as a broken one that should be either fixed or dumped. But on the umbrella front, you could say I’m covered. I can take care of keeping myself dry and I don’t need to fall in behind a neighbour and catch a bit of his shelter on a wet day. In this household, we either keep ourselves dry, or we put up with getting wet when it rains.
As a country, we don’t really believe in having a national security umbrella to keep us safe. We are more like the guy with the broken umbrella, a token gesture towards shelter but one that might not be of much use if there is a thunderstorm. We rely on the neighbours.
The war in Ukraine has changed the world security dynamic, with Russian aggression at a much higher level than even at the height of the Cold War. The blatant attempt to instal a puppet government in Ukraine by force shows the dangers of a rabid dictatorship on the borders of the EU. Already Russia is ramping up the ante, trying to goad other EU countries to retaliate. Just last week, a Russian border patrol on a hovercraft crossed into Estonia, hardly an accident since the border is clearly defined in the area where the incident took place. And during the visit of President Zelensky to Dublin, drones were launched in our direction, while Russian ships regularly anchor near the undersea cables that keep our high-tech economy running.
Yet we are in denial, holding a mistaken belief that nobody will touch us because we are neutral. Switzerland is neutral too, but with an army of 30,000 active soldiers and a well-equipped and highly trained reserve of more than 100,000 more. Roosevelt once said, ‘speak softly, but carry a big stick,’ but we don’t carry any stick, and we rely on our neighbours to do that for us. For how long more can that last?
I once walked from London to Liverpool, not because I didn’t have the train fare, but because you see a lot more of a country when you walk through it. Near Nantwich, I spotted a sign that said ‘secret bunker’ so I diverted to have a look. The ‘secret’ bunker, now a museum, is a decommissioned Cold-War facility designed to house the government during a nuclear war. The inside is much the same as it always was, but the map in the old control room tells a story. It shows all the ‘first strike’ targets for the nuclear missiles from the then Soviet Union, with Shannon prominent on that list.
Neutrality won’t save us if war comes back to the mainland of Europe We need to be prepared, but we’re not.
