Stephen Collins: Expulsion of Russian diplomats reflects a dawning reality

The expulsion of four Russian diplomats from Ireland has brought out into the open something that has been known to the security services for a long time – the Russian embassy in Dublin is the base for a sophisticated spy network that threatens the security of this country as well as our friends and neighbours.

It has long been a puzzle that Russia has 31 accredited diplomats at its embassy in Dublin, more than any other foreign country, apart from the United States, despite the limited trade between the two countries and the small number of citizens of each who were resident in the other. By contrast Ireland has four diplomats accredited to Moscow.

The security services here and in Britain had evidence that Russian agents were using Ireland as a base to travel to the UK to meet contacts and gather information

Well over a decade ago a high-ranking Irish public official told me at a confidential gathering about serious concerns in Dublin and London at the way the Russian state was using its embassy here as a base for spying in Ireland and the UK. The scale of that activity accounted for the disproportionately large number of accredited Russian diplomats based here.

At that stage the security services here and in Britain had evidence that Russian agents were using Ireland as a base to travel to the UK to meet contacts and gather information. They used the Common Travel Area between the two countries as a way of circumventing surveillance that would be applied routinely to accredited Russian diplomats in Britain.

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US companies

Since then the problem had got more serious and the authorities are now concerned that as well as using Ireland as a base for spying on the UK the Russians are attempting to penetrate the major US companies operating here. They are also gathering intelligence on this country given its status as a European Union member state.

The attempt by the Russians to undertake a massive expansion of their facilities on the 5.5-acre embassy site on Orwell Road caused serious alarm when planning permission was granted by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council in 2015. What caused particular worry was that part of the plan incorporated a large underground complex when there was plenty of room on the large site for building above ground. The only conclusion was that the massive subterranean development was going to be used for operating undetectable and sophisticated computer equipment to be used for data mining and troll farming, among other things.

Alarmed by the plans the government amended the planning legislation in 2018 to allow it to reject planning approval on the grounds of national security. That legislation was invoked with no publicity in March 2020 to block most of the development at Orwell Road on the grounds that it was “likely to be harmful to the security and defence of the State and the State’s relations with other states”.

Planning documents show some building work continued in the aftermath of the decision. Over the past two years, there has been progress on several aspects of the project which were not the subject of the blocking order, including on an underground car park. One give-away about what is going on is that almost all of the workers on the site have been brought in from Russia, even those involved in mundane aspects of the construction.

Strategic analysis

Although three Russian diplomats were expelled from Ireland in the 1980s for spying there was little political interest in the activity of the embassy until relatively recently, even though it has been a concern of the security services for a long time.

That has changed with the establishment of the National Security Analysis Centre, which was one of the recommendations in the report in 2018 from the Commission on the Future of Policing in Ireland. The centre has been given the task of providing high-quality strategic analysis to the Taoiseach and the Government about the key threats to national security. Based in the Taoiseach’s department it liaises with the National Cyber Security Centre and with EU and international counterparts.

The establishment of the centre was long overdue given the range of security threats faced by this country. The cyberattack on the Health Service Executive and the Russian naval manoeuvres off the southwest coast earlier in the year sounded the alarm but the brutal invasion of Ukraine has shown the scale of the danger Putin’s Russia now poses to the entire democratic world.

It has been a rude wake-up call for this country and the signs are that the recent report of the Commission on the Defence Forces will end the shameful political neglect that has befallen them. Hopefully it will also spark a realistic discussion about Ireland’s approach to defence. The major political parties have for far too long allowed self-proclaimed defenders of Irish neutrality, who are often anti-western and pro-Russian, to have an undue influence in dictating defence policy.

The invasion of Ukraine has shown us as never before that we need to recognise the security threats that face all EU member states. The fact that Ireland took part in a co-ordinated expulsion of Russian diplomats with other EU countries this week is another sign that reality has dawned about where this country’s interests really lie.