Volodymyr Zelenskyy is my international political leader of 2025. I am amazed and humbled by how this small, slightly-built former actor and comedian has, with immense calm, courage and indefatigability, maintained his morale, and the morale of his embattled country, through a year of merciless battering by the Russian army, public humiliation and near-betrayal by Donald Trump and indecision by the European Union. On Christmas Eve he was unveiling the latest peace plan, featuring a demilitarised zone along frozen battle lines, with both Ukrainian and Russian armies withdrawing equal distances to facilitate this. Almost certainly Vladimir Putin will say ‘Nyet’ and will continue his army’s grinding advance in Donbas and murderous nightly bombardment of Ukraine’s cities and towns with hundreds of missiles and drones.

Following the EU’s latest ‘fudge’, declining to use Russian assets held in Belgium to fund the Kiev government (while offering a €90 billion loan), where does little Ireland stand in a potential confrontation between the EU and Russia over Ukraine? In a hard-hitting opinion piece earlier this month, the Irish Times‘ excellent political editor, Pat Leahy, wrote: “It seems increasingly likely that the question of Ukraine’s ultimate survival as a sovereign and free country will come down to what the EU decides to do.”¹

He went on: “I wonder how much help we can be.” A 2022 report from the government-appointed Commission on the Defence Forces concluded that Ireland was effectively defenceless on land, on sea and in the air.² In particular, the report said that Ireland, with its eight-aircraft Air Corps, had “no air defence of any significance.”

Leahy continued: “It is hard for EU allies to take Ireland seriously on security and defence matters. This is emphatically not because Ireland is a neutral country. Nobody minds that we are neutral. But they do mind that we are not contributing meaningfully to the EU’s defence. They do mind that we are not capable of defending ourselves. They do mind that we have to rely on the expensively maintained armed forces of other countries – including, principally, the British [the irony of that!] – to defend the critical European infrastructure that runs through our waters in the shape of transatlantic cables. And they really mind that while not doing any of this, we see fit to lecture others about ‘peace’.

“And they really, really mind that we do and don’t do all this while enjoying the fruits of the most prosperous economy in Europe, buoyed by tax revenues from the US companies whose lucrative data flows through those same cables.

“We love to tell ourselves that we are renowned the world over as a neutral country, a ‘voice for peace’, on the side of right, not might. There is some truth to this. We have valuable connections to the global South where our mostly non-colonial past, and our history of missionary activity, has some currency.

“But among EU governments and the people who make policy decisions in our part of the world, many see us as freeloaders who combine an ability to benefit from the EU with an unwillingness to do our fair share in defending it – whilst at the same time striking a pose as moral leaders.”

Leahy pointed out that “the EU has been the single most important policy of this country for the past half century.” Most Irish people would agree that the benefits of EU membership to this country have been enormous. But “now the character of the EU is changing in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, ongoing Russian aggression aimed at EU members and the stepping back of the US from its traditional role as the guarantor of European security. Defence and security are becoming core parts of what the EU does.”

Is this “a dangerous fantasy of bushy-eyebrowed colonels in bunkers, bent on the ‘militarisation’ of the EU at the behest of the ‘military industrial complex”[in President Catherine Connolly’s words during her election campaign]? Ask the Poles, Leahy said, as they mobilise 10,000 soldiers to guard railways that were sabotaged last month? Ask the Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians, targeted by Russian-sourced cyberattacks, drones and balloons around their airports? Ask the Germans, probably the European country most reluctant to contemplate a conflict with Russia, whose head of military intelligence told a parliamentary committee recently that Moscow “will not hesitate, if necessary, to engage in a direct military confrontation with NATO”. Ask the Ukrainians.

“All of this makes the world a more frightening place. Is an outright conflict between NATO – or at least the European members of NATO – and Russia now likely? Let’s hope not. But it looks more possible than at any time since the height of the Cold War. History teaches us that only strength deters menace. It all makes fretting about the triple lock seem faintly ridiculous, doesn’t it?”

And yet neutrality in general, and the triple lock in particular, were at the centre of Catherine Connolly’s highly successful presidential election campaign. [The triple lock means that any deployment of more than 12 Irish peacekeeping soldiers overseas must have the approval of the government, the Dáil and the UN Security Council, including, one must assume, its permanent members, the US, Russia and China. What kind of an independent foreign policy is that?]. We Irish people love our neutrality. And one can see this point of view, for who wants to be dragged into a war over a faraway Eastern European country of which we know little? (Where have we heard that before?) And anyway, didn’t we do our bit by taking in more than 120,000 Ukrainian refugees, around 80,000 of whom have remained?

The British historian of and commentator on Eastern Europe, Timothy Garton Ash, argues strongly that “it’s up to us Europeans to enable Ukraine to survive armed assault from Moscow and diplomatic betrayal from Washington. In doing so, we also defend ourselves.”³

He then lists reasons why the EU may not act militarily: the myth of Russian invincibility; learned helplessness after 80 years of depending on the US for European security; the bureaucratic slowness of the EU; acute competition for public money in often heavily indebted European states with ageing populations; and national egoisms that saw Belgium’s right-wing prime minister hold out against the seizure – on behalf of the EU – of Russian frozen assets in that country and their transfer to finance Kiev. He asks: “Will our diverse, complicated, self-doubting continent rise to this challenge?”

Speaking as a cussed northerner, it’s the tone of moral superiority adopted by those strongly in favour of Irish neutrality and non-involvement that often gets to me. Was it morally superior (as opposed to the pragmatism of a small nation less than 20 years after its war of independence against Britain) to be neutral in the Second World War when Britain was leading Europe’s democratic forces in the fight against Nazism? No. Was it morally superior to be both neutral and Catholic (and thus anti-Communist) during the Cold War, while sheltering under the US nuclear umbrella like the rest of Europe? No. So is it morally superior to refuse to have anything to do with an EU defence force when there is a warmongering Russian state on our common European doorstep? I would say no.

If we’re going to be Europeans – having joined an association of nations which in 50 years saw us move from being one of the continent’s poorest countries to one of its richest – we have to play our part, however small, in the defence of the common European home that has been so good for us and is now going through a difficult and dangerous time. At the very least, why don’t we take a lead by making a firm offer of 360 Irish soldiers (roughly the same number as we send to UNIFIL in Lebanon, whose mission will end at the end of next year) to a European ‘reassurance force’ to help guarantee and police any ceasefire in Ukraine? It’s a daunting prospect, and I am full of foreboding. But I believe it’s the right thing to do.

¹ ‘Fretting about the triple lock seems ridiculous now’, Irish Times, 6 December

² Conor Gallagher, ‘Who protects Irish skies? The secret air defence deal that dates back to the Cold War’, Irish Times, 8 May 2023

³ ‘Only Europe can save Ukraine from Putin and Trump – but will it?’, Guardian, 6 December