Wake Up, NATO Rugby Dad, Before They Take Your Gobdaw “European” Son

You’re watching the match. Your son is beside you in an Aran jumper he bought for the aesthetic, cosplaying the culchie maternal uncles he looks down on, scrolling the news on his phone. A drone hit a German airport in August. No investigation concluded. But the German defence minister is already posturing, and your son is nodding along. You feel a small thrill at the seriousness of it all. That thrill is the problem.

The Dáil voted 79 to 71 this week to gut the triple lock. The debate was guillotined to under four hours, not because the bill was urgent, but because the Government didn't want its own backbenchers speaking against it. Fourteen Fianna Fáil TDs had already signed a letter of concern. The lock is not gone yet, but the first substantive vote to remove it has been won.

Helen McEntee told the Dáil it was "absolutely crazy" that five countries could decide where Ireland sends its troops. That line speaks directly to the rugby dad: a middle-aged middle-management bravado that mistakes military alignment for maturity. 

You have never deployed a soldier nor been deployed. You have never known war except WW2 documentaries from the comfort of the same couch you sit in there with your son. But scrapping the lock feels like a vindication of your collective masculinities, like buying a sports car on hire purchase: a proxy potency for a life that never quite felt serious enough.

You are not being strong and taking a stand like in the films when the “rational men” have to make the “tough decisions” and it's all very sad while they send off working class lads to die, there may be sad music and a single stoic tear shed.

You are using your consent to shed the blood of Ireland's sons in foreign wars to come, in order to launder your shame over your comfortable metropolitan lifestyle. You aren’t taking a principled stand, you are kneeling to the demands of the empire, and trying to pass off someone else's son as your tithe. 

You do not think they’ll take your Fiachra with his good multinational job and his degree. You think they’ll go around Dublin and round up the Anto’s, Rayo’s and Tommo’s come down here to Limerick and take the Mikey’s, Willie’s and Frankie’s and come back via the Midlands and take the John-Joe’s, Pa-Joes and Jimmy-Johns. 

Your son is the softer version of the same disease. He calls himself European first. His Irishness is an aesthetic: the knitwear, the artisan silver, the trad session he's photographed at once a year in the town he did his summer in the Gaeltacht in. He is embarrassed by neutrality and by the past. 

He thinks "Europe" means shared defence, and that anyone who asks a question is pro-Russian. He is not evil. He is just, in spite of all his expensive education (why you had to buy your midlife crisis BMW on Hire Purchase), a gobdaw, and worse, a useful one. He will applaud the war. He thinks he will not fight it. Not supporting it though makes him feel soft and emasculated in front of his multinational colleagues from Europe. 

The miscalculation both of ye have made however, is that he will fight it, and he will not be an officer making the “tough decisions”. He will be sharing dry rations with Anto and digging in with John Joe.

The reason why is simple. Ireland is a strategic land mass so if a pan European war starts they will have to get us in on it in order to secure us as a strategic military outpost. They don't need Fiachra to tell them how to mobilise where, it's not the same as moving things around a spreadsheet.

They have Hans for that. Conscription is back on the table in Berlin. There are 186,000 standing in the Bundeswehr as we speak and thousands per year doing Military Service before they ever set foot in University. Many stay in the Bundeswehr and become professional soldiers. 

What is Fiachra with his spreadsheet going to do for them? They’ll take one look at his 6ft frame and his physique built from weekend rugby, hand him a uniform, and stand him beside the lads built from summers in the bog and the lads built from labouring on sites. We are strongly built, easy to feed, cannon fodder for them the same as we were for the British Empire. They do not care for your ideas above your station. They don't care that Fiachra identifies as European, so long as he is willing to die as one. They care that we can fight and are one of the European peoples with the least standing and power historically. They’ll fight for Ukraine who's not in the EU but turn a blind eye to the north while we are actually in the EU. That’ll tell you where we stand. To them he's a strong looking paddy able to hold a gun.

And I'll tell you something else: We down here have absolutely no intention of handing over our brothers and sons to fight for a Europe we do not even identify with, so they won’t be getting many volunteers down the country. 

Germany accused Russia on the 1st of September. Merz's advisers said that had there been casualties, they would have considered invoking Article 5. The Bundeswehr has raised its sabotage threat level to "considerable". This is the atmosphere in which your Government chose to remove the brake. It did not happen in a vacuum. It is not happening for no reason. 

Only 34% of people support removing the triple lock. The Government has the votes. It does not have the argument. Your son is not being educated into a proud “modern, educated European”. He is being recruited as consent-manufacturing for a war he will fight, not merely watch from behind a screen and shed a single, stoic, patriotic tear about.

Talk to him. Call your TD. Get your arse off the couch and protest, we could all do with the walk. The final stages are still to come. The lock is not gone yet.

Do not hand them the keys to your door to take your son because you were too comfortable to notice the match was nearing its end and we had more to lose than face.