An Open Letter to Taoiseach Micheál Martin In Support Of Irish Neutrality

Taoiseach,

You told the West Cork History Festival on Friday, 7th of August that the only alternative your opponents offer is to “do nothing and stand by as Russia and others continue to destroy international peacekeeping.” You called reform of the Triple Lock the victim of “wide misrepresentations and demagoguery.” You said those of us defending it have “got worse” as we “aggressively denounce” those who don’t.

I organise with the Tipperary Neutrality Network. We collected over a thousand signatures in this county alone calling for the Triple Lock’s protection. We brought those signatures to Tipperary County Council through elected allies and watched the motion amended until it meant almost nothing. We’ll be marching through Clonmel Saturday 15th in defiance of your intent to sell out the tradition of Irish neutrality. So let me answer you plainly, in the language you used against us, and then in the language we actually use.

Nobody serious is proposing “nothing.” What we are proposing is the thing Ireland has actually done for sixty years: peacekeeping under a United Nations mandate, voted on by the Security Council, deployed with the Dáil’s consent on top. That is not inaction. Irish soldiers served in UNIFIL in southern Lebanon for forty-eight years. Forty-seven of them never came home. They didn’t die doing nothing. They died under a UN mandate, keeping a peace that a government resolution alone could never have authorised with the same legitimacy.

When you say the alternative to scrapping the Triple Lock is to “stand by,” you’re not describing our position. You’re describing a position nobody holds, so you don’t have to answer the one we do.

You say peacekeeping is likely to disappear. You’re right. And your bill accelerates it.

You’re not wrong that the UN peacekeeping model is under strain. Look at what’s actually replacing it though, in the two cases that matter most right now, neither of which you have named.

UNIFIL, the mission Irish soldiers served in for half a century, ends this December. In late June, the EU quietly circulated a proposal to replace it: a new mission with no UN mandate and no Security Council vote, to train Lebanese forces in “border security.” Israel currently holds positions inside Lebanon in defiance of the ceasefire it signed itself. A line drawn by tanks, not the Blue Line the UN established. The EU’s proposed mission would train Lebanese forces to police that line. Not challenge it. Police it. UNIFIL existed to push occupation back. This mission would help make the occupation permanent. That’s not continuity. That’s a different mission wearing the old one’s name, and it’s exactly the kind of deployment the Triple Lock currently keeps Irish troops out of.

Then there’s Operation Irini. It began as a UN-backed arms embargo mission off Libya. Its UN mandate lapsed, and under the Triple Lock, Ireland was required to withdraw, which your own Minister McEntee called a scandal. We call it the law working as intended. Irini didn’t stop. It kept going, and its focus shifted: boarding vessels in international waters, hunting Russia’s so-called shadow fleet, without a Security Council vote behind it. Russia calls that piracy. Whatever you call it, it’s not the mission Ireland originally joined, and the Triple Lock correctly identified that and pulled us out. That’s not the mechanism failing. That’s the mechanism doing its job.

So when you tell the country that the model we’ve supported for sixty years is disappearing unless we evolve our policies, you’re describing the consequence of the exact policy shift you’re proposing. The UN mandate model isn’t dying of natural causes. It’s being routed around, deliberately, by the EU and by your own government, and the Triple Lock is the one thing standing between that routing-around and Irish soldiers being sent to take part in it.

And this isn’t hypothetical either. This week your government confirmed the first appointments to the military attaché network it announced back in March. Officers posted to Washington, London and Paris. Not to the UN. Not to a single neutral country. To the three powers most invested in Europe’s rearmament. If the Triple Lock is only ever going to be used to keep us out of missions we were never going to join anyway, that announcement makes no sense. It only makes sense if you expect to need it gone.

On Russia, since you raised it. You spent a large part of your speech on Russian revanchism, on the closing of archives, on the erasure of Tartar and Ukrainian history under occupation. I don’t dispute any of it. I don’t support Moscow, and I don’t support its illegal war on Ukraine. But naming Russia’s crimes isn’t an argument for scrapping an Irish domestic legal safeguard. It’s a substitute for one. You used the same move Frank Aiken’s generation would have recognised in any empire’s propaganda: point at the enemy’s cruelty, and hope nobody asks what that has to do with the bill in front of the Dáil.

On “demagoguery.” You’re entitled to call our position wrong. You’re not entitled to call it dishonest without evidence, and you offered none. No engagement with UNIFIL’s replacement, none with Irini, none with the attachés, none with the fact that sixty-three per cent of this country elected a President last October who ran explicitly on defending neutrality and warning against EU militarisation. That’s the largest mandate ever won in a contested Irish presidential election. If anyone in this debate is refusing to engage with the argument actually being made, Taoiseach, look at your own speech again.

A word on where your government’s idea of security actually points. While you were in Inishbeg talking about protecting peacekeeping, Slievenamon, the mountain that gave its name to the anthem of the county I live in and love, Tipperary, was still recovering from a fire that burned through roughly seven hundred hectares of Coillte plantation last month. Retained firefighters from Clonmel, Cahir and Carrick-on-Suir, on wages that don’t cover a family, fought it without a single water bomber, because this state has never funded an aerial firefighting fleet. The EU was sending aircraft to fight fires in France and Spain at the same time. We watched.

There’s money for EU naval operations and military attachés to three capitals. There was no money for that mountain. When you talk about security, Taoiseach, be honest about whose security you mean. It hasn’t, so far, been the retained firefighter’s or the working class communities they serve.

So here’s what we’re asking for. Not “nothing.” Keep the Triple Lock. Defend Irish neutrality as it’s actually functioned for sixty years: UN mandate, Security Council vote, Dáil approval on top, all three, not one alone. That’s the whole of our demand, and we won’t be talked out of it by a false choice between the Triple Lock and peacekeeping, when the evidence in front of us, Lebanon, Irini, the attachés, shows plainly that it’s the Triple Lock keeping Ireland out of the missions that would end peacekeeping’s actual meaning, not preserving it.

We’re not going anywhere, Taoiseach. We’ll be marching in Clonmel and we’ll march again. And groups like us all across the country will do the same in their communities until the will of the Irish people is heard, by hook or by crook.

Owen Buchanan

Tipperary Neutrality Network