„Ein Haufen Schmarotzer“ – Zunehmender britischer Druck auf Irland, in die Verteidigung zu investieren

This is how we’re seen across Europe to be fair

Interesting article. I know defence spending is very unpalatable to the Irish general public, but reading between the lines they’re going to have to do something, otherwise they’re leaving themselves open to more drastic action from the UK, EU and NATO (in the future).

Edit: Just seeing the comments below, we can see how divisive the subject is. A hard thing for a government to get over the line with public support! I can see them having been backed into a corner somewhat though via neighbours and political partners.

A bit rich for the UK to say that. They’re the only one who’s deployed troops to Ireland in the last few centuries 

Couldnt care less about what the Brits think tbh – if they want to stop patrolling they can 

We’ve absolutely developed a reputation as freeloaders when it comes to defence and it’s not just the Brits that think that, it’s basically everyone. They’re 100% correct on this issue.

We refuse to do even the absolute barest of minimums to provide reasonable defence and security capabilities and then we simultaneously criticise other countries for their defence spending and “war mongering”.

They’re always beating us with that stick. During WWII as well. They’d the underground to hide his in from the bombers. It’s all well and good when you’ve former empire money and infrastructure in the chamber. Irelands been barely not poor since the mid 90’s.

Well, well, well! When the free state was formed they were against large scale militarisation of Ireland and now they require it.

So the Europeans who have been defense freeloading off the USA are calling us freeloaders? 😱

The Brits were perfectly happy for us to stay demilitarised for decades. It’s a bit rich of them to get all stroppy about it now.

Freeload on and chalk it down to reparations for all the death they inflicted on the island.

Makes sense, UK would be the first to stab us in the back if their Peach Pedo overlord told them too. 💀

It’s ironic that Britain is criticising the lack of defence infrastructure and capabilities of the island when they themselves have dropped their own defense capabilities in Northern Ireland since the 90’s and post-GFA. In terms of ‚pulling their weight‘, they’ve militarily withdrawn from NI which they have argued for so long is their own territory. I don’t even mean troops on the border or patrolling streets, the article tells you they’d pulled down radar installations in NI which would be specifically for Air Defences.

Furthermore, the UK claims Rockall Island as theirs, which extends their controlling territorial range quite a fair bit North West;

https://preview.redd.it/agwqw92d32kg1.jpeg?width=3308&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6e5b62552a4e0ca911f9e337e0ae1a3fbe506a55

See that thin band of light blue around Ireland? That’s what the UK is moaning about that Ireland leaves undefended, since you can’t realistically restrict transit access in the larger EEZ areas. For those Russian Hypersonic Missile Submarines coming from the Arctic Circle (which btw [Canada, the US, Norway, and Iceland have controlling access apart from the Russians](https://arcticportal.org/images/education/quick_facts/government_policies/EEZ/1_Map.jpg), hence Trump’s overt Greenland acquisition attempts), they’d have to go through Norwegian, Danish, and the UK’s controlled waters and EEZ’s (the blue/black lines) to take advantage. If the range of these hypersonics is to be believed, the Russians wouldn’t even need to be in Irish Waters – the Faroe (Danish) or Shetland (UK) Isles would do. Or y’know, Murmansk or Vyborg – [Ireland and the UK are already in range from Russian Ballistics](https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/images/full-reports/2023/58255-fig2-2_russia-coverage.png) without leaving port.

So why pressure Ireland? Because the US suddenly lost interest in the North Atlantic part of NATO (and arguably the TO as well…), and [the UK is a massive weapons exporter](https://worldostats.com/country-stats/arms-exports-by-country/). The EU is larger (between France and Germany), but Ireland doesn’t have any independent defence manufacturing (a standout amongst neutral countries) so Ireland would *have* to procure lucrative contracts with someone external, and the UK would prefer it would be from them. Ireland already has a history of buying British military surplus, particulary in the Irish Navy.

This isn’t even covering the economic policy that usually follows from increased defence spending; reduced social welfare and government services spending. Ireland can’t even handle that without going horrendously overbudget even with a budget surplus, so how d’you reckon it would go with a sudden investment in defence too?

I think it’s important to read behind the paper and the messages from former UK admirals who also happen to be members of the UUP (Aiken) and Reform UK (Parry, the ‚freeloader‘ quote source). UK (and the EU) see massive increases in their defence budget and can’t imagine the mounds of pounds and euro coming from their growing defence export industry if Ireland had to commit to some defence expenditure. It’s not so much ’sharing the load‘ of national defence, but more ‚we stand to make a lot of cash from this situation‘.

TLDR; Nuance. Ireland *is* defenceless and probably do *something* about it, but from Russian Hypersonics and other fearmongering that pushes the responsibility soley on Ireland to ’step up‘ by buying lots of surplus British equipment? Nah. If Ireland span up a native defence industry with all the Apple Tax rebate or dumped it into French/German/Austrian/Swedish defence procurements, I think we’d hear a new complaint from these UK admirals, given their party allegiances.

The amount of plebs in this thread is unreal, we can and should spend on defence for many things, other than arms.

Cybersecurity – the cloud is the modern battlefield and we should be able to detect/respond to cyber threats that seek to disrupt the country. This can be beneficial to wider society/businesses. Effectively just a more tooled up NCSC.

Primary radar – if we were being invaded we wouldn’t even know about it due to the lack of radar infrastructure. Radar for sea to detect pesky Russian submarines causing mischief + could be used for detecting drug/gun smuggling operations or even detecting unauthorized fishing vessels operating in our waters.

Personnel – boots on the ground, as well as giving employment they can be used for disaster recovery situations such as flooding events. Even when our navy had about 4 ships we didn’t have the personnel to manage them and as a result most were all tied up in Haulbowline. Increased spending could also include paying personnel decent wages which would keep all the money in our economy as well.

Vehicles – planes/helicopters for doing even basic duties like search and rescue, monitoring threats such as the pesky Russians. We don’t exactly need a fleet of f35s but we only have about 10 aircraft in total which covers everything and if one of them was ever down for maintenance we would have nothing.