What Should Ireland's Geostrategic Objectives Be in 2024
We have long been accustomed to the idea that Ireland is but a jewel on the western seas of Europe and while beautiful to us, ultimately powerless on the world stage. This has been a mindset beaten into the Irish for centuries by Anglo-Norman, Anglo-Saxon aristocrats. “See Paddy,” they would jeer. “If we didn’t beat you, the rest of the world could do as it liked to you”. This self-crippling belief may have had some slight kernel of truth were we still impoverished.
Yet by any metric, Ireland is by now a middle-ranking European power. We are firmly in the upper echelon of global economic output (even should one discount the mind boggling effects of the multinationals on GDP) with real economic output somewhere between 300 bn and 600 bn (not including the North adding another 50-100bn). For an island of seven million people that is remarkable.
The times has arrived for us to create a school of strategic thinking. What are Ireland’s interests, and how do we go about securing them?
Ireland is a small island economy. To continue providing services, we need access to raw materials for import, and markets to export and service. Ireland’s high value exports are IT and Pharmaceuticals. So there are, in my belief, four critical areas which we should develop thinking towards:
Energy Security
Data
Materials
Physical security
Ireland is a massive and significant importer of fuels and energy. This has led to us having one of the highest energy costs in Europe. While there is much written about Ireland’s natural gas and oil resources off the western coast, there is little proven and Ireland’s regulatory environment has punished any attempt at finding viable fields. If such fields exist, it will take a decade to get fields up and producing in any meaningful quantity.
Ireland’s aversion to nuclear power is also deeply hypocritical, both in the dishonest way in which green activists campaign against it over “costs” (as if the green energy technologies they supported didn’t require massive State investment to make them viable too) but also the way in which the Irish State will happily buy electricity produced by nuclear turbines in Britain or France.
Any serious Irish State would pursue both avenues - in creating clean and stable power generation through nuclear energy and through the exploitation of any natural gas or oil reserves off the coasts. There are three-fold benefits to this:
Building reliable and scalable electricity producing infrastructure to sustain the growth of services
The reduction of energy costs for transport/heating (feeding into lower prices for everything).
The creation of a stable revenue supply for the State, akin to Norway’s massive sovereign wealth fund.
Anyone waiting for impending economic collapse is probably going to wait a while - if one reads early internet posts in the latter-mid of the last century, one would be led to believe that industrial society was due to fall over any day now. Take precautions, learn valuable skills, but the system has a remarkable longevity.
Data is going to be the gold of the next century - Ireland should be proactive in planning to provide data centre hosting at large scale to the rest of Europe and the world. This means starting up a national cyber-intelligence agency to develop tools and strategies to not only protect critical infrastructure, but to engage in offensive cyber-operations against rivals.
As we move ever more towards “cloud” technology, generative AI, and deepfaking, we will need ever more complex systems to safeguard personal and strategic data. This is not cheap and not something you can learn overnight.
Access to materials will largely be outside of Ireland’s control barring a new era of neo-colonialism, determined by how protectionist developing economies become, and how violently developed powers secure supply lines. We are unfortunately but necessarily tied into the European sphere to ensure raw resource supply.
That leads us into the final area - physical security.
The Defence Forces are fit to be blown over by a strong breeze and there is zero ambition among policymakers to become even a barely functional security provider in the North Atlantic. At present, strategic thinking seems to be “throw a few more pennies at the Department and then strip it out to give it to Health at the end of the year anyway”.
The Level of Ambition decided upon by the Government is a pitiful “more of the same.” Even at its most ambitious option, it would barely become a normal functioning European power. Ireland needs to go beyond mere platitudes on Defence planning.
Ireland must invest heavily in high-value military production. Ireland does not have the resources to produce half a million artillery shells a year and the aforementioned costs on energy and importing raw materials would make this a non-starter. Yet Ireland should involve itself as Norway has one in the development of high-value munitions, like the Joint Strike Missile. This type of R&D and strategic partnerships would allow Ireland to benefit from integration into a security framework - Ireland needs to make itself an invaluable cog in the machine, rather than relying on the childish hopes that mere geography will keep us safe.
For those saying Ireland is too small to have such ambitions - Ireland has seven million people on the island, Sweden has ten million. Sweden has in the region of two hundred companies in their defence industry which produce everything from fighter-jet aircraft to infantry anti-tank weapons, electronic sensors to cannons, submarines and rocket engines to anti-air batteries. This sector of the economy generates between €4 and €5 billion a year. Swedish defence spending accounts for €12bn a year.
By contrast Ireland spends around a tenth of that sum. The Department of Children and Integration has a budget of €7.5 billion - housing asylum seekers and Ukrainians alone costs somewhere in the region of €2 billion, before one even gets into the planned increases in spending to house even more. By contrast in 2019, the Department had a budget of €1.5 billion.
There will forever be cries for more funding for health, or social protection, or housing but these sectors of the economy will never have enough money. The development of a culture of strategic thinking in Ireland may lead to the system realising that importing endless numbers of foreigners makes everything else impossible to do.
Lest we hope.