Gavan Reilly: Tweaking the triple lock makes sense … just not this week

The Government’s aspirations to lift the ‘Triple Lock’ are no secret and have been well laundered for quite a while - both the 2024 and 2025 iterations of this government have argued the case that needing UN approval for the deployment of troops meant Ireland’s foreign policy was partly decided in Moscow and Beijing.

That’s true: often people are too quick to confuse the two terms ‘neutrality’ and ‘independence’. It’s perfectly legitimate not to want Ireland to join the likes of NATO, but it’s perfectly legitimate to think that Ireland does not currently have military independence. Aside from the contentious fact that the UK keeps an eye on our airspace because we haven’t the ability to do so ourselves, it’s nonsensical that a country with a proud history of independence would feel the need to always get an international thumbs-up whenever there’s a desire to send troops abroad.

Forget even peacekeeping for a moment. There’s a European initiative, a Maritime Analysis and Operations Centre, which Ireland co-founded some years ago to try and stop the flood of illegal drugs from Spain as part of a clampdown on the gangland crime. Yet, purportedly, Ireland cannot participate in its own initiative, because there is no UN mandate to do so.

The publicity problem for the government is that it’s now making this move, at precisely the time when Europe is clearly becoming more militarised: this proposal has been on the agenda for some time, but is being cleared by Cabinet only in the same week that Europe is pointedly talking about arming itself, so that it’s no longer depending on America to do the honourable thing and continue backing Ukraine.

Why the government has chosen this week - where the lines between the European Union and an America-free NATO are more blurred than ever - to pursue what is otherwise a reasonable idea, is beyond your humble columnist.