The debate the Republic is having with itself over military neutrality is not concerned for the moment with Northern Ireland but it will have major implications for us nevertheless.
We have long been the elephant in this particular room. When Nato was established in 1949, the Republic examined membership or association through a separate treaty with the United States before deciding against it due to its territorial dispute with the UK.
That dispute was officially resolved by the Good Friday Agreement and the changing of Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish constitution. The Republic joined two pan-European Nato peacekeeping agreements the following year. However, the timing of this was a coincidence, driven by a separate debate in Dublin throughout the 1990s on general post-Cold War and European politics.
The legal technicalities of defence policy were considered by the drafters of the Good Friday Agreement but Nato membership was never raised as a serious issue at any point before, during or after negotiations. It was understandable that everyone considered it an unnecessary complication, yet it was still a striking omission and a missed opportunity.
The east-west strand of the Good Friday Agreement has always been its Cinderella dimension, a failed sop to unionists with obscure talking shops such as the British-Irish Council. A British-Irish military partnership, via Nato, would be potent symbolism and meaningful practice.
Nationalism has failed to consider the advantages to its own cause. Integrating belligerent peoples through military service is a trick as old as civilisation. It built the Roman empire, although it might be better not to mention Rome or empires in this context. Perhaps a more relevant illustration is how the United States pioneered racial integration in the armed forces - unsuccessfully for wider society, as it turned out, although still considered a triumph within the forces.
There has been a lot of chin-stroking in recent years over what it might take to reconcile loyalists to a united Ireland.
Having contemplated the militant Britishness of a culture epitomised by young working-class men, nationalism invariably cries ‘a-ha!’ and proposes joining the Commonwealth, before immediately ruling it out as unacceptably monarchist.
This absurd monologue looks like displacement activity from the answer staring everyone in the face.
The British army maintains ‘Irish’ regiments to this day, has further regiments based in Northern Ireland and recruits from the Republic. Nato membership and its required defence spending would let a united Ireland adopt this structure and flip it around, or create its own, with northern regiments still serving alongside British colleagues on deployment, training and exercise. They could all salute the queen or king while they were at it. Nobody gives a toss about the Commonwealth.
Although Ireland’s attachment to neutrality is a deep political tradition it is increasingly shallow in reality. The two Nato agreements the Republic signed in 1999, the Partnership for Peace and the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, have evolved into more active cooperation, as their design intends - they are meant to be staging posts to full membership.
Over the same period, the Republic has moved towards the EU’s evolving common security policy, joining shared battle groups in 2006 and Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO), a programme to integrate forces, in 2017. This is leading up to the creation of a European army, as has been well understood for decades. Despite occasional claims from France, such an army is not an alternative to Nato. The EU and Nato both see themselves as complementary and essential to each other.
Brexit has made little difference to the UK’s place in this arrangement. The UK set up the EU’s common defence policy in 1998, together with France, only to back away. It was always going to be a close military partner to Brussels at one step removed.
London and Dublin signed their own defence cooperation agreement in 2015, formalising and extending the UK’s long-standing protection of Irish airspace and waters.
So history was already pointing in one direction when Vladimir Putin accelerated the process. The Republic will be drawn into closer collaboration with the UK, EU and Nato. Even Sinn Féin accepts this has reached a tipping point, judging by the party’s swiftly toughening stance on Russia.
Passionate defence of Irish neutrality increasingly falls to the anti-western left, whose every utterance further discredits and marginalises the subject.
No British person can criticise Ireland’s crank left problem after the UK’s close brush with a Jeremy Corbyn government - but they can note the parallel. Irish neutrality, like Corbynism, could vanish with surprising speed.
