Tara Brady | Workers’ Party of Ireland
The Workers’ Party of Ireland join you today at a crucial moment in our country’s history. Ireland’s long and proud tradition of neutrality is under direct threat—not by war on our shores, but by policies disingenuously crafted in government buildings and Brussels boardrooms.
The government’s plan to dismantle the Triple Lock—the mechanism that ensures Irish troops can only be deployed abroad with approval from the Cabinet, the Dáil (our lower parliament), and the United Nations—is not a technical adjustment. It represents a fundamental shift in our foreign policy and a perilous step toward deeper EU militarisation and NATO alignment.
This is being done without public consent, just as so many protests and acts of civil disobedience across Western Europe face attacks and restrictions by governments purporting to represent liberty. Polls repeatedly show that 75% of the Irish people support neutrality. The constant cheerleading for NATO in Irish media and corridors of power is not simply undemocratic. It is a betrayal. It is an assault. Not a day goes by without paranoid newspaper headlines: Irish Neutrality Won’t Save You from Russia. Or Cyberattacks. They are coming for our undersea cables, our elections, our freedoms. Light entertainers sing NATO’s praises on Sunday morning chat shows.
Irish neutrality is not a relic of the Cold War. It has shaped who we are on the global stage—a small nation that chooses peace over power, diplomacy over domination by elites and imperial powers.
It was Frank Aiken, one of our great statesmen, who championed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. It was Ireland that led in banning cluster bombs and landmines. And it is Ireland that has contributed peacekeepers to UN missions every year since 1958.
Neutrality and existence outside NATO have never meant passivity. It has meant leadership—moral, political, and diplomatic – and the rejection of bourgeois wars.
Yet today, the Irish government applauds European Commission President and unabashed warmonger Ursula von der Leyen’s call to “rearm Europe.” We see military budgets soaring, arms companies lobbying the EU, and policies being reshaped to suit NATO’s agenda.
Is this the Europe we want? A Europe of war preparations on behalf of the ruling class, where peace is just a talking point? Or not even?
In 2023, global military spending reached a staggering $2.44 trillion. As Irish President Michael D. Higgins said, that is a shameful statistic while – across the EU – people go hungry and unhoused.
Every euro spent on weapons is a euro not spent on climate action, health care, or education. And every move toward war alliances brings us further from the values that define us as a nation, and define us as Marxist-Leninists
We are told in increasingly threatening tones that Ireland must militarise to defend subsea cables, protect tech infrastructure, and fit into new “security partnerships.” These dire warnings, far from serving Irish sovereignty, only highlight Ireland’s economic dependency on big tech and US foreign policy.
Our neutrality is not a weakness. It is our strength.
The Triple Lock is one of the last institutional protections for neutrality. Its removal would allow the government to send Irish troops into EU or NATO missions, without a UN mandate.
In other words, not to keep peace, but potentially to wage war, to lose the lives of workers on behalf of the moneyed classes. NATO, we can agree, will not send our nation or others into the wars Marx characterises as “…waged by an oppressed class against the oppressor class, by slaves against slaveholders, by serfs against landowners, and by wage workers against the bourgeoisie,”
NATO will not ask us to evaluate “each war concretely and separately, locating each in its distinct historical context”. NATO will tell us who to fight. NATO will erode our constitutional commitment to the peaceful resolution of international disputes and sideline the very institution—the United Nations—that Ireland has helped strengthen for decades.
The irony is staggering: we would weaken the UN just as it faces its greatest crisis, with genocide unfolding in Gaza and a still extant Nazi threat in Ukraine.
Despite what you may read in newspapers or hear from conservative commentators, the Irish people are not confused about neutrality. They know that neutrality means we don’t become a pawn in a NATO war.
And yet, decisions are being made in secret—like the recent move to join a NATO-aligned intelligence-sharing alliance, CISE. The justification? Russian submarines in the Irish Sea. Manufactured panic. Misleading threats. And all to make militarisation seem inevitable.
But it is not inevitable. It is a choice.
Ireland has a decision to make. Do we align with a rising tide of militarism and surveillance? Or do we double down on diplomacy, peacebuilding, and humanitarian leadership?
The Workers Party calls on the Irish Government to:
Halt any attempt to dismantle the Triple Lock.
Reaffirm our commitment to neutrality in word and deed.
Withdraw from military partnerships not grounded in UN peacekeeping.
Redirect resources from weapons to welfare—housing, health, climate, and education.
That future, and this pertains to our entire continent, must not be left to a handful of ministers and lobbyists behind closed doors. This is too important. Future generations will ask what we did when neutrality was under threat, what we did when our respective nations became beholden to the NATO war machine. Let us answer with courage.
The task of the moment is not rearming Europe after it squandered so much military hardware to illegally support Ukraine. The task is defending peace. The task is the rejection of bourgeois conflicts.
Let us keep Ireland neutral.
Let’s keep Ireland out of NATO. It’s a stand, we hope, that can start a chain reaction.
