The debate about the triple lock has been conducted as though neutrality and peacekeeping were the same thing. Neutrality means not joining military alliances or defence pacts – but this means little unless the State can defend its decision to stay neutral. Peacekeeping is something our soldiers do during other people’s wars, with their hands deliberately tied. The triple lock fused the two together.
My understanding of the interplay between all three comes from my time spent at a checkpoint in south Lebanon.
On September 29th, 1992, an armoured vehicle raced up the hill to an Irish checkpoint at Al Jurn that was receiving heavy fire from a Hizbullah team, with one soldier already wounded. The team turned its attention to the vehicle and engaged it with belt-fed machine gun fire, killing Corporal Peter Ward, aged 29. All that was left to the Irish afterwards was for senior officers to go down, liaise with the mukhtars, seek reassurance and calm everything down.
I arrived in July 1993, stationed at the same checkpoint. The training from the NCOs was very deliberate: no heroics. Two of my platoon carried gunshot scars from previous tours. There was no institutional capture of lessons learned in combat; what we knew, we learned from the NCOs.
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That July, Hizbullah had been increasing the intensity of its attacks along the Israeli-controlled area. One morning, it attacked all the Israeli-backed militia posts at once. With nowhere else to go, a steady stream of people came to the checkpoint, growing to over a hundred by late afternoon.
Four hundred metres to our west, a Hizbullah heavy mortar team worked behind a hill, out of view of the South Lebanese Army post above Haddatha. The 120mm mortar fired unseen over the crest. A brown Volvo skirted the checkpoint, and the team began setting up the mortar on the far side of our building, in the open. We were still working out what was happening when two rounds went out, with a concussion we felt as much as heard. The mortar team walked away. They knew what they had done: a weapon placed in the open, and a crowd hidden behind it. While we were considering options, surrounded by civilians, the answer was already travelling across the valley.
Above Haddatha, 6km away, sat a T-55, an old Soviet tank. The tank was never designed to fire that far. But battle-hardened fighters figured out that by putting it on a ramp, you could extend its range. Ahead of its own sound, a 100mm solid tank round smashed through the building, blowing civilians and soldiers alike off their feet amid the rubble. Good training means you tell yourself to get up, even when your ears are ringing, and get on the radio. Two red flares went up to signal that we had been engaged by the South Lebanese Army. Miraculously, no one was killed.
Later, with shellfire still working through the area, our company commander came down to the checkpoint. He shook every hand as a man who meant it, told us we had done well and that we’d be at this for a while, and went back out into it.
Had there been deaths, condemnation would have been swift, from Dublin to New York and every humanitarian group with a letterhead – but not for the men with the mortar. Condemnation doesn’t arrive for people who don’t have an address.
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Three years later I was back in Lebanon, first with an explosives ordnance team and then as one of four Irish soldiers assisting the UN investigation into the Israeli shelling that killed 102 civilians sheltering inside the UN post at Qana. Another UN position that offered little protection. The fire continued to find Irish soldiers: Billy Kedian, killed on May 31st, 1999, by South Lebanese Army mortar fire, and Seán Rooney, shot dead by Hizbullah on December 14th, 2022.
Forty-eight years of Unifil, and satellite imagery now shows 46 of the 54 towns and villages inside the zone Israel holds heavily damaged or flattened. Unifil is winding down. If Ireland goes back at all, it will be to help train the Lebanese Armed Forces in an EU-led mission, and Taoiseach Micheál Martin has said it currently cannot do so without a UN mandate.
For most people, the triple lock is an abstraction. Yet the mandate is what has shaped the Defence Forces. The reality is that, in the Defence Forces, you sit between belligerents. It’s a form of community policing without the policing that underpins it: the ability to seize the initiative, deny resources and prosecute where necessary. A soldier is trained in options and can shape their environment. Peacekeepers don’t have many of those options. Do that mission after mission, and an army is no longer being forged in combat or anything like it; it is being forged for mediocrity. Peacekeeping has become the ceiling of our military capability when it should be the floor.
If the Defence Forces are intent on going back out to Lebanon, we have to ask what for. If it is to observe or to watch and bear witness, then we should be honest about that. If it is to protect civilians, then we need to explain how – or admit that it is not the mission. Those are the considerations Ireland should legitimately address before we consider going back.
Neutrality that can’t be defended is not neutrality at all. Keeping or removing the triple lock doesn’t change that.
Alan Kearney is a retired Defence Forces senior officer. He served four tours with the Irish Battalion in Lebanon in the 1990s and returned as Aide de Camp to the Head of Mission in 2018/19
