Ireland is trying to “have its cake, and eat it” on neutrality, and will in coming years have to consider what it actually means, the former head of the Government-appointed forum on security, Louise Richardson, has said.
Speaking in Dublin, Ms Richardson, who now leads the Carnegie Foundation in New York, said Ireland’s geographical location has been enough to offer security over recent decades, but “the world is changing”.
“I think it’s very healthy that the Government here has started to have a discussion about Irish neutrality and what it means, because the neutrality we enjoy doesn’t really fit with any accepted interpretation of neutrality.
“We’re not a member of any military alliance, but our political sympathies are unambiguous, and we do participate actively in European Union defence, collective defence, and indeed even with Nato and the Partnership for Peace,” she said.
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Ms Richardson was speaking during an interview with Queen’s University Belfast academic, Professor Richard English, hosted by the Royal Irish Academy and the University of Notre Dame’s Analysing and Researching Ireland, North and South (ARINS) project.
Saying that Ireland will have “to revisit” the issue of neutrality, Ms Richardson said the threats now posed by Russian submarines to the fibre optic cables that now run from Ireland to the United States is but one of the security challenges to become visible in recent years.
‘The only version of Irish history we heard was one of Irish heroism and English perfidy’
— Louise Richardson
Ireland is unique among European countries that declare neutrality, such as Switzerland, since “they all are in a position to defend their neutrality. Ireland is not. If anybody was to challenge our neutrality, we couldn’t defend it.”
Countries such as Finland, Sweden, Switzerland and Austria all have conscription, for example, she told the ARINS gathering: “So we are, again, in a very Irish situation where we have our cake and we’re eating it too,” she said.
Saying that she had grown up with “a passionate hatred of England”, she said she and classmates had gathered for assembly in school every morning “beneath the Crucifix and the Proclamation of Independence with the photographs of what we considered the seven martyrs who’d signed (it).
“The only version of Irish history we heard was one of Irish heroism and English perfidy. There was never any questioning of that. It was easy to hate English and England as an abstraction because you never really encountered any English people,” she said.
She was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2022 in recognition for her efforts at the University of Oxford and, earlier, the University of St Andrews to increase the number of undergraduates from poorer backgrounds.
In addition, the honour, which entitles her to the title “Dame”, marked her work to secure the partnership with AstraZeneca for the production and distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine developed at University of Oxford.
During her terms leading two of the United Kingdom’s top universities, she said “the biggest surprise” came when she realised how many people “particularly in Conservative circles in Britain had never really adapted to Irish independence”.
“They never felt that Ireland was a completely independent country,” she said in a knowledge gap that explained many of the mistakes made by the Conservatives and others before and after the 2016 Brexit referendum.
Following the Conservatives’ departure from office, she said the Labour government offers “a real opportunity to repair those relations which were damaged”, since “Labour’s attitude towards Ireland has long been much more pragmatic, with much less of the historical overtones”.
