What’s the secrecy all about? The Irish Times’s reporting on a memorandum of understanding between Ireland and the UK allowing the RAF to intercept incoming, potentially hostile aircraft over Irish territory or seas contains information which hardly comes as a surprise.
The 70-year-old memo has been amended and upgraded several times since, more or less on the nod by the Cabinet. A number of intercepts of Russian flights have been publicly reported and discussed. Back in 2005 then taoiseach Bertie Ahern somewhat coyly acknowledged, when asked about the issue, “cooperation and a pre-agreed understanding on these matters”.
Russian can scarcely believe that the UK – or, more precisely, Nato – would not provide air cover for Ireland if we were under threat. So the prolonged failure publicly to acknowledge the existence of the understanding is more about domestic political considerations – specifically dodging embarrassing questions about implications for neutrality – and long-fingering the need for action on the 2022 Commission on the Defence Forces’ inevitable conclusion that Ireland “has no air defence capability of any significance”.
Public silence also avoids awkward arguments about whether the memo rises to the level of a “treaty” which would be covered by the constitutional requirement that “every international agreement to which the State becomes a party shall be laid before Dáil Éireann”. That argument is due to come before the High Court, but there is some plausibility in the defence likely to be at the core of the State case that what it is concerned with is the facilitation of Britain’s defence of its own security rather than the protection of Irish airspace. Overflights of Irish territory, not intercepts, are what are being authorised, it will be argued. If Irish security benefits, that’s a bonus.
Such an interpretation has also allowed the State to dodge concerns expressed by Air Corps officers about the legal basis for authorising the use of force either by the RAF or the Air Corps in downing, say, an incoming hijacked plane.
The existence of the memo, arguably, also subtly changes in an unacknowledged way the nature of the relationship between Britain and Ireland. The two are not just friendly, cooperating neighbours with a complicated history, but, in this respect, military allies committed to some, albeit limited, form of mutual defence.
That reality is difficult and uncomfortable to address for a political class that has always been unwilling, until recently, even to debate the meaning of neutrality. Whether the memo’s existence rises to the level of an actual erosion of neutrality, vehemently denied by the Government, it has nevertheless opened up another chink in the argument. That will play into – and add a dose of reality to – the forthcoming consultations on the issue.