The French have been blocking streets to force the hand of the state since 1789. In 2018, they blocked roundabouts in yellow vests and the government reversed a fuel tax within weeks. In France, barricades are not a threat to the republic – they are the republic. On Thursday morning in the capital of another European republic – Ireland – farmers parked their tractors and truckers their trucks on O’Connell Bridge. And so the Irish Government called on the army.
Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan invoked “aid to the civil power” and asked the Defence Forces to deploy heavy vehicles to remove vehicles from roads and fuel depots. Owners were warned, in language more suited to a hostage crisis than a dispute over diesel prices, not to later complain about damage caused during removal. This may be the single most damaging thing the Government could do to the case for Irish defence – and it has done it three months before assuming the EU presidency, during which defence and security for 27 member states will be discussed.
For four years, a serious argument has been building that Ireland needs to invest in its military. The Commission on the Defence Forces made 130 recommendations. It described a force hollowed out by decades of neglect, roughly 20 per cent below its already modest establishment strength. The submarine cables carrying over 90 per cent of Europe’s transatlantic data traffic run through Irish-controlled waters, effectively unprotected. Similarly, the Whitegate refinery supplies 40 per cent of Ireland’s fuel and has no redundancy. These are real vulnerabilities. And yet the Defence Forces has been asked to tow a Fendt away from the Whitegate refinery.
Ireland was trying to show it could take its own defence seriously. The EU presidency in July was supposed to be the moment it was put to the test. The old narrative – that neutrality means we don’t need a military – was finally giving way to something more sophisticated: that Ireland needs defence capability in order to protect its own waters, its own infrastructure, its own sovereignty, not to fight foreign wars.
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And then the Government threatened to deploy the army against its own citizens – which is effectively what this looks like, even if there are no plans for army personnel to be deployed in direct confrontation with protesters. Nobody disputes the legal basis.
But what is rather more interesting is what it does to the political case for defence in a country that has spent a century keeping its military underfunded, and largely confined to peacekeeping and ceremonialism.
After the Civil War, the Free State dismantled its own army to eliminate an alternative power centre. Postwar Germany wasn’t trusted with a military by its neighbours; post-independence Ireland wasn’t trusted with one by its own citizens. And for a century, the arrangement made sense. The State kept the military small and quiet, and the public didn’t ask too many questions about submarine cables or British maritime patrol aircraft over Irish waters. Like all gentleman’s agreements, it worked right until it didn’t.
Thursday broke that agreement. Someone in Government appears to have remembered Ireland has a military and decided to take it for a test drive – not against any of the genuine threats the Commission on the Defence Forces spent two years identifying, but against tractors. Every voter who ever heard “we need to invest in the military” and felt an instinctive unease now has proof that their instinct was right. The message this sends is: give the State a bigger military and what will it do? Use it against you.
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Ireland needs greater defence capability. The threats are real, they are growing and they will not wait. But public consent is the foundation on which defence investment is built and this Government has just taken a sledgehammer to that with impressive efficiency. How does the Minister for Defence go to the Dáil next month and argue for increased recruitment and better pay – the things the Defence Forces desperately need?
The Government will say it had no choice; that the disruption was real. Reaching for the military when you don’t know what else to do feels decisive and it probably looks strong on the evening news. But it may be a decision that feels very different six months from now.
Ireland cannot credibly say it will use its military against its citizens one day and build public support for that same military the next. It can’t warn Brussels about subsea cable sabotage in March and threaten to deploy the Defence Forces’ manpower against John Deeres in April. It can’t ask young people to enlist in a force that was just invoked to intimidate farmers. It cannot present itself as a serious European security partner while preparing to use soldiers as a heavy-vehicle removal service.
But this is what happens when there is no strategy – just reactive lurching from crisis to crisis, drunk on whatever power is nearest to hand. One day critical infrastructure is a phrase for EU presidency briefings; the next it is the justification for sending soldiers against farmers.
The Government didn’t just call in the army; it also proved every sceptic in the country right.
Sinéad O’Sullivan is a business economist and founder of Security Ireland, an independent policy institute providing evidence-based analysis on Ireland’s security and defence architecture, which has no external funding or industry affiliations
