IRELAND’S HYPOCRISY ON DEFENCE IS FARCICAL

IF THERE were an annual prize for political hypocrisy, we could close the nomination list for 2024 now.

No one or nothing could beat the Irish taoiseach Leo Varadkar telling delegates at the Munich Security Conference at the weekend: ‘It’s important that the European Union does more when it comes to its own defence.’

I don’t know if this was greeted with incredulous laughter by the other European leaders present, but that would have been the most appropriate response.

There is no bigger freeloader on European defence and security than Ireland. It spends barely 0.2 per cent of its GDP on defence, much lower than any other EU state.

If it were in Nato (which it isn’t), it would have to commit to ten times that. But even other neutral states, such as Switzerland and Austria, spend almost four times as much as Ireland as a proportion of GDP.

Last week, a member of the Irish parliament, Cathal Berry, seized on a report by the British think-tank Policy Exchange, co-authored by the former Nato secretarygeneral Lord Robertson, which exposed the full extent of Varadkar’s imposture: ‘Are we freeloaders? Yes, for sure. However, we don’t need the UK to tell us [that] Ireland is like a guy who goes to the pub with his friends and never buys a round when it’s his turn.

‘Worse still, Ireland is like the guy who the very next morning mocks his friends for supporting the drinks industry.’

Berry, a former commander in the Irish armed forces, added: ‘We have no militarygrade sonar capability in Ireland. If that doesn’t tell you we don’t take defence in our home waters seriously, you don’t need further evidence.’ As the head of Policy Exchange, Dean Godson, points out, Ireland is relying on us to do the necessary, in terms of protecting undersea cables in those waters: ‘It is the UK taxpayer who effectively foots many of the bills, despite the rampant post-Brexit Anglophobia of much of the Irish Republic.’

After his astoundingly hypocritical remarks in Munich, Varadkar was interviewed at length on BBC Radio 4. Not once was he asked about the contradiction between his call for Europe ‘to do more when it comes to its own defence’ and Dublin’s profitably pious pacifism. How does he get away with it?