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By Suzie Mélange
From pastifism to pacifism
As the government prepares to jettison the triple lock,
clear thinking could make Ireland a power for peace —
but it needs to address contradictions and ground its
geopolitics in international law not post-colonialism
A
s government moves fractiously
to dismantle the triple lock
whereby troops are not deployed
overseas without resolutions
of Government, Dáil and UN,
Ireland still fancies itself as the small, steady
state that stands apart from power blocs; a
country whose geopolitical modesty stems
from moral clarity. Neutrality — “military but
not always political”, “active not passive” —
has become the closest thing the Republic
has to a foreign-policy identity. Despite elite
pressure, polling consistently shows support
above 60 per cent for “Ireland’s current model
of military neutrality”. The Government’s own
Consultative Forum on International Security
in 2023 discovered that public submissions,
even when deeply divided on specifics,
treated neutrality as something “distinctively
Irish”, a rare weaponised superiority.
But the story is dicult to defend. For more
than a lifetime, Ireland has promoted an image
of peaceful exceptionalism while celebrating
the antithetical foundation on which the State
was built. Too often, neutrality is allowed to
do ethical work it was never designed to bear,
quietly standing in for pacifism without ever
commemorated as guerrilla ingenuity against
overwhelming odds. And British state violence
was indeed systematic: the Black and Tans
and Auxiliaries specialised in reprisals, arson,
torture, and collective punishment. But Irish
violence was also strategic and at times brutal.
Between 2,000 and 2,300 people were killed,
a third of them civilians.
The subsequent Treaty split produced a
civil war (1922–23) in which the pro-Treaty
side — the proto-State — used executions,
censorship, and internment at a scale that
dwarfed the independence struggle. The
Free State executed eighty-one prisoners by
firing squad. Roughly 12,000 republicans
were interned; torture and beatings were well
documented; unocial killings, such as the
Ballyseedy massacre, were subsequently
covered up. Something under 2,000 were
killed, around an eighth of them civilians.
The mood of the times is also somewhat
represented in Ireland’s 1937 Constitution.
Though in many places it fuses Catholic social
thought with republican freedom and equality,
it also contains hard edges of authority. Article
28.3.3°, for example, permits emergency
powers during “war or armed rebellion”, a
INTERNATIONAL
being argued, justified, or practised as such.
Ireland was not born in peace, it was born in
rupture. The 1916 Rising was a violent minority
revolt launched without popular mandate. It
produced more than 450 deaths in a single
week, the majority civilians. The Rising’s
leaders explicitly embraced bloodshed —
blood sacrifice was voguish in Europe —
believing that a “rising of sucient magnitude”
would transform global perceptions during
the First World War. Its proclamation grounds
sovereignty in the “taking up of arms” and
rights by their being “asserted in action”,
invoking “dead generations” to cast the
Republic as inheritor of an insurrectionary,
armed tradition, not to mention its fervour
for gallant, undeniably militaristic, allies in
Europe.
The modern State reveres 1916
hagiographically, almost theologically, killing,
martyrdom and all, yet the backstory of
violence is laundered as transcendent of today,
separate almost to the point of mythology. The
violence is neither repudiated nor ethically
worked through; it is simply sealed o, leaving
later claims of peace to float free of origin.
The War of Independence (1919–21) is
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A state born in insurrection,
guerrilla warfare, and
constitutional coercion
must do more than repeat
slogans if it wishes to take
a genuinely Kantian role in
world affairs
clause activated until 1976 and used to justify
executive overreach. There was internment
without trial in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1970s.
Political Ireland frequently invokes
the Constitution as evidence of a peace-
centred national DNA, but amnesia sets in
when analysing how the same document
rationalised emergency rule, censorship,
and coercive policing. A pacifist polity would
have had to confront these powers directly;
neutrality, being strategic rather than ethical,
never required it.
Long after independence and the embrace
of neutrality, the IRA campaign in Northern
Ireland (1969–98) was perpetrated with no
sense that violence undermines neutrality.
Though formally separate from the State, the
Provisional IRA drew justification from the
earlier revolutionary period that the Republic
still venerates. Current supporters of Sinn Féin,
its political wing, typically defer to no one in
their defence of neutrality, yet the Provisional
IRA campaign killed more than 1,700 people
(loyalist paramilitaries killed over 1,000, often
colluding with elements of British security
forces). Reactively, the State in the South
interned republicans, used the Oences
Against the State Acts expansively, including
to set up a Garda “heavy gang” precipitating
abuses in cases such as Sallins, and it kept
Sinn Féin o the airwaves from 1971 to 1994.
Indeed, we still retain a “Special” Criminal
Court.
So, violence was not incidental; it was
constitutive to Irish republicanism. This does
not mean the State did not evolve ethically; it
does suggest, however, that claims of moral
exceptionalism require a reckoning with
celebrated origins rather than their erasure.
Foundational violence confers an obligation
of heightened moral responsibility, not just
of remote discomfort. The point is not that
Ireland’s origins morally contaminate its
present, but that the State and the people
never fully articulated the terms on which they
departed from them. Neutrality risks being a
posture if it is never worked out as a principle.
The problem, then, is not violent origin but
incomplete ethical settlement. This resonates
for two features of Irish foreign policy: current
military neutrality and the unexamined, often
implied, possibility of pacifism.
Against the background of formative, and
wtth a futuer of some contained-violence,
the catalytic choice was actually made during
the Second World War (tellingly and evasively
known as the “Emergency”), when neutrality
arose from strategic caution rather than moral
theory. It did not require a moral grounding. It
did not even substantially impinge on the still-
fresh national attitude to violence.
Confusion later eased the way to a pragmatic
rather than a principled interpretation of
neutrality. Ireland co-operated with Allied
intelligence, shared weather information, and
tacitly facilitated the rescue of downed Allied
airmen while interning Axis flyers.
Ireland’s biggest decision on neutrality
was actually staying out of NATO when it was
created in 1949 — not because it opposed
Western military strategy, but because
joining would have required accepting British
sovereignty over Northern Ireland. This was a
geopolitical calculation, not a pacifist refusal.
Ireland’s UN peacekeeping missions since
1958 remain one of its most honourable
traditions, but participation in some UN
operations does not make Ireland generally
neutral, still less pacifist.
Our indulgence of the US military subverts
claims of neutrality outright. Shannon Airport’s
long-standing facilitation of US military flights
— peace campaigners allege more than three
million troops have passed through since
the Afghan war around 2001 (and there have
been compromising misuses of our air space)
— undermines the moral authority with which
Ireland speaks on conflicts such as Gaza or
Ukraine. Inspections are rare; oversight weaker
still. It is all so well known it must be accepted
as deliberate, and therefore hypocritical.
No pacifist doctrine could survive such an
arrangement.
Moreover, the actual motivation for Ireland’s
foreign policy is often less neutral than
post-colonial. Much of the instinct to “stand
apart” expresses not idealism but the desire
to dierentiate from Britain and its military
entanglements. This is understandable, but
it militates against principled pacifism, which
demands universality rather than relational
distinction.
And of course many people are less
instinctively neutral about some places than
others. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael now speak
fluently about “responsibility”, “European
security”, and “shared threats”, and their
enthusiasm for EU defence integration could
cut across neutrality altogether.
Sinn Féin and People Before Profit
frame foreign policy primarily through anti-
imperialism, often condemning American
or British militarism with forensic zeal while
adopting a more ambivalent vocabulary when
the aggressor is non-Western, geopolitically
ambiguous, or ideologically congenial.
Selective condemnation is incompatible
with pacifism, even if it can be made to coexist
with rhetorical neutrality.
If Ireland wants to champion neutrality
internationally — and it should — it must first
recognise and confront the contradictions
baked into its grounding mythology. And it is
getting late, because those contradictions are
hard-wired. Neutrality is Ireland’s principal
constitutional taboo. That it annoys many
progressives to say so hardly belies the fact.
Neutrality cannot just be a confused
inheritance; it must be a choice whose
privileges are earned through consistency,
law, and international solidarity. But the
taboo underpins, and conduces to, cross-
purposes and contradictions. The result is a
political culture where neutrality, a strategic
posture, is rhetorically burdened with the
moral work of pacifism, an ethical doctrine it
Our own pacifism is not the goal. It
should be world peace
A genuinely pacifist
Ireland would recognise
that its natural
institutional home is not
NATO, nor an immobilised
Security Council, but the
UN General Assembly
which has been history’s
quiet, and frustrated,
legislator
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was never designed to bear. While some of
this confusion is genuine, at the level of state
practice the conflation functions as moral
laundering: neutrality is invoked to claim
idealistic virtue without accepting pacifist
constraint. What is missing, from government
and opposition alike, is any sustained
articulation of neutrality as a principle rather
than a pose, as a manifestation of heartfelt
geopolitical independence. Advised or not,
perhaps opposition to the Mercosur trade deal
is a flicker of what genuine independence in
policy might look like.
The selective nature of the rhetoric becomes
clearer when concrete statements are
examined. In the Dáil on 6 June 2023, then-
Tánaiste Micheál Martin argued that the triple
lock, which requires a UN resolution before
Ireland can deploy troops overseas, was
“no longer fit for purpose” and that Ireland
must “move with our European partners”.
Leo Varadkar echoed this in November 2023,
calling the mechanism “a relic that restricts
Ireland from acting responsibly”.
Contrariwise, at some high levels neutrality
is treated as sacred. Catherine Connolly, one
of the few consistently principled voices for
neutrality in the Dáil, warned in the 2023
Consultative Forum that neutrality is being
“eroded by stealth”. Her predecessor as
President, Michael D Higgins, was criticised
by ministers for “straying into politics” after a
June 2023 interview criticising a government-
sponsored forum on international security
for its composition (dominated by military
figures rather than independent experts), and
questioning whether decisions were being
shaped by strategic alliances rather than
Ireland’s historical neutral position. Higgins
asserted the firm view that Ireland’s stance
is “positive neutrality”, and has consistently
argued against joining or aligning too closely
with military blocs such as NATO.
The fissure between Higgins and
government illustrates how little consensus
exists on what neutrality — let alone peace —
should actually mean in Irish politics.
Meanwhile, EU defence integration is
accelerating. PESCO, the European Defence
Fund, joint procurement arrangements, cyber
units, and hybrid-threat taskforces increasingly
blur the boundary between a civilian union
and a military actor. Successive governments
— particularly under Fine Gael leadership —
insist that none of this undermines neutrality.
Yet the simultaneous push to dismantle the
triple lock reveals a clear ideological direction
of travel. Neutrality without constraints
becomes neutrality in name only.
Ireland’s widely accepted foundation
narrative suggests account for multiple
historical divergences between the principles
of neutrality and pacifism and the real
motivations of its geopolitical positions,
Against this background a comnprehensive
deference to the resolutions of the UN would
be purgative and salutary.
Yet Ireland has extraordinary potential to
chart a dierent course. It is geographically
insulated, wealthy, diplomatically credible,
post-colonial yet Western, free from the
temptations of coercive military power, and
yes nominally neutral. Its reputation in human-
rights diplomacy, its peacekeeping tradition,
and its stature within the Global South all
grant it disproportionate influence. Few states
in Europe are better placed to pursue a pacifist
rather than quasi-neutral foreign policy
grounded in Kantian universalism.
A genuinely pacifist Ireland would recognise
that its natural institutional home is not NATO,
nor the increasingly militarised structures
of the European Union, nor an immobilised
Security Council, but the UN General Assembly
(GA), even if it is neither a legislature nor a cour
and ts resolutions are non-binding, unevenly
enforced, and routinely ignored by powerful
states. Because the GA is the only global
forum where norms can be articulated without
veto, where consistency can be demanded
even when enforcement is impossible, and
where legitimacy derives from majoritarian
deliberation rather than coercive power. The
GA has been history’s quiet standard bearer.
Resolution 1514 dismantled colonialism;
Resolution 2625 articulated the principles
of self-determination and non-intervention;
Resolution 3314 defined aggression; and
Resolution 76/300 recognised the right to a
clean, healthy environment. Its resolutions
on Israel are exemplary. Emergency special
sessions on Ukraine produced overwhelming
majorities condemning Russia’s invasion.
Unfortunately Trump’s MAGA contempt for
the UN has pre-empted resolutions on his
lawless actions in Venezuela and Iran in recent
months but UN human rights committees
have expressed hostility to US’ unilateral
action; and American’s rising, and brutal,
hegemony is hardly an argument against
Ireland championing the GA. Pacifism
demands procedural consistency rather than
outcome perfection, and Ireland should aord
the General Assembly deference for its norm-
setting function, not the uneven enforcement
that reflects power rather than principle.
Imminent GA initiatives on autonomous
weapons, climate-driven insecurity, digital
surveillance and Palestinian statehood will
shape the moral architecture of the century
ahead.
If Ireland is serious about peace, the
imperative is clear: row in behind the General
Assembly consistently, amplify its resolutions,
and treat them as the ethical floor of a
generally pacifistic Irish foreign policy rather
than obscure optional ornaments.
Pacifism is not naïveté. It requires a
disciplined legal framework, constitutional
clarity, and a single set of standards applied
across conflicts, no matter the belligerents. It
requires attention to the misuse of Irish civilian
infrastructure, honest parliamentary oversight
of military transit, and a renewed commitment
to global disarmament where Ireland has
historically excelled.
Ireland could aspire to being the world’s
first Kantian state diplomatically, if it finally
admits that peace was not our origin and must
therefore, to be credible, become our choice.
Ireland could become a pacifist power,
disproportionately influential in a militarising
Europe precisely because of its smallness,
its history, and its diplomatic capital. But
neutrality alone will not suce. Neutrality
without consistency becomes posture. And
it must proselytise for it. Our own pacifism
cannot by any means be the goal. It is world
peace. And our central place in it.
Ireland should choose the illuminating
discipline of peace and sweep the lighthouse
beams across this hell-bound world.
Neutrality is not an
inheritance; it is a choice
that must be earned
through consistency,
law, and international
solidarity
Sovereignty grounded in
taking of arms
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