Ireland’s security must be taken more seriously, says Mellett

The Government must take the country’s security “more seriously” and invest more money in the Defence Forces, the former chief of staff, Vice-Admiral Mark Mellett has said.

Speaking at this week's MacGill online summer school, the vice-admiral underlined that Ireland has the lowest spending on defence in the EU at 0.2 per cent, far below the union's average of 1.2 per cent.

“I will get into trouble for saying this but I have said this in the past, we’re number 27 out of 27 in terms of investing in defence. What do we know that the other 26 don’t know in the context of security challenges we all face?” he said.

Ireland’s Defence Forces have been “hidden behind the walls of barracks” for 100 years and this needs to change, he said, adding that the Defence Forces would be kept very busy in the coming years “in the context of climate-related challenges and disasters”.

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Vice-Admiral Mark Mellett repeatedly noted in his contribution to Friday’s event that Ireland was facing an “existential threat through climate change” and that the country’s response to the crisis was “of pivotal importance”. “Unchecked, this will lead to catastrophic flooding, climate fires, extreme weather, loss of life, destruction of species and a third of the world’s population regularly exposed to severe heat with health problems and more heat related deaths.”

Also taking part in Friday’s talk, which focused on whether the State’s Civil Service and Oireachtas would be up to the task of rebuilding the country post-pandemic, Professor of Management at UCD Niamh Brennan said “control” of large corporations would be a key element in Ireland’s response to the climate crisis. “Corporations are delivering the most damage to the climate with incessant aspirations for growth,” she said. “I can’t see if we’re going to address climate change that we can continue to operate as a hyper consumerist society.

“Our whole attitude towards consumerism will have to abate. We’re going to have think completely differently about companies, about what they do and their growth.”

Ms Brennan also noted that Ireland was just "a tiny drop in the ocean" in terms of climate change and that larger countries such as China, the US and India needed to lead by example. If Irish farmers are forced to suffer badly while other countries do not contribute their fair share, it could become "problematic" and lead to the kind of "civil unrest" seen during the water charges protests, she said.

Head of mission for the Middle East Desalination Research Center Ciarán Ó Cuinn told the event Ireland needed to engage in the “creative destruction” of its political system and create something totally new in order to build a more robust and visionary governance system. Too much of the Government’s functionality has been based on “its ability to cut and paste from the Brits and then from Brussels”, said Mr Ó Cuinn. Ireland also lacks any “meaningful decentralisation which means the local becomes the national” while there’s “very low strategic public policy capacity” within our Civil Service.

This Civil Service is being asked to fill the “strategic gap” left empty by a party political system “that doesn’t have a lot of policy capacity” and over time that becomes “institutional and invisible”.

The State is suffering from a “diminished capacity to regulate regulators” and as a result “bureaucracy tends to become policy”, he added. With the question of a united Ireland coming down the tracks, both the Republic and the North will have to engage in “creative destruction of this state” in order to create a new, third way of governing, said Mr Ó Cuinn. This will be “based on us looking at Mr [Edward] Carson and Mr [Patrick] Pearse and Mrs [Constance] Markievicz and saying thank you very much, we’ve really enjoyed the last 100 years but we need to bury you now and create something new.”