Ireland will have no other option but to join an EU army
■ It was refreshing to read Ray Kinsella on why Ireland should play no part in an EU army (Irish Independent, December 15).
Though I am in agreement with him on the importance of Ireland maintaining its neutrality within the framework of the EU, I am not at all confident that any exceptions will be tolerated.
Once the UK leaves, the EU will have lost its most meaningful military power, and with Russia becoming more belligerent in its contempt for the EU, there will be pressure by the leading EU powers to rapidly complete their plans for an EU army, along with a common defence, taxation and foreign policy. Any country that objects will be pointed towards the Brexit door and threatened with isolation and penury. That is why it is imperative that the EU humiliates and impoverishes the UK, so that the rest of us will murmur the accepted pieties, genuflect to the wall and behave as “good Europeans”.
There will be no opt-out for Ireland from an EU army. With the UK gone, there will be zero tolerance for countries semidetached from the “European Project”. If the EU army was to be another vanity project like the euro, then this wouldn’t much matter. But with the EU and Russia growing culturally and politically further and further apart, it matters a great deal.
I accept Ray Kinsella’s assurance that Russia has no intention of invading Europe; but it is well in Russia’s power to pick an argument with one of the Baltic states, take some territory and engage in a long, low-level, and humiliating war with the EU. A war that would cost Russia little and the EU its prosperity, its peace and its prestige.
Unfortunately, much of the content of some national newspapers falsely gives the impression that those reluctant Leavers and reluctant Remainers in the UK, are nostalgic idiots for Empire, “loons” who walk their imagined half-timbered streets, whistling Vera Lynn’s ‘There’ll always be an England’. A view of the UK that does nothing, except pander to our own national prejudices.
The newspapers that were as guilty as the banks in being cheerleaders for our “boom” are engaged once again in stoking up the flames of unbalanced, uncritical national hegemony. I just hope figuratively and metaphorically, that it doesn’t all blow up in our children’s faces.
Kevin Ryan