The Ukraine war holds big risk and big reward for Micheál and Mary Lou

SHAKESPEARE’S King Henry IV advises his son Hal, the future King Henry V, to ‘busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels, that action, hence borne out, may waste the memory of the former days’. Hal listened and created a row that led to Agincourt, and giddy minds have been busied by foreign adventures ever since Shakespeare explained the strategy.

Vladimir Putin may have taken Henry IV’s advice as literally as the king’s medieval contemporaries would have – but we wouldn’t dare suggest that a similar strategy is at play in the Taoiseach’s current fortnight of foreign forays.

Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s marathon tour of historic capitals and palaces is unlikely to distract minds here from soaring prices and rapidly ascending political tensions, but it will serve a subtle and not immediately obvious purpose.

For the entirety of his reign as Taoiseach, he has faced one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – pestilence (the Covid pandemic). Since February 24, as a European leader, he has witnessed two of the others: war and death.

Mr Martin’s words in Versailles on Friday, where he spoke of European enlargement to counter the rise of authoritarian regimes, were delivered with a deftness that few of his Irish contemporaries could manage.

With his vast experience and his sure-footed leadership, while only in the early stages of a full-blown crisis, Mr Martin appears statesmanlike – in sharp contrast to the Sinn Féin opposition.

One of the great foes of the 20th Century has returned – Russia. And although Vladimir Putin is in reality closer to National Socialism than socialism, Russia has always been the great red scare for centre-leaning voters in the West, Ireland included.

Whereas the dark spectre of Sinn Féin’s IRA past does not seem to have put off many prospective voters, whispers of a lack of fervour in decrying Russia in recent years may hit their mark. The truth of the situation is less important than the fact that red scares usually get that crucial element in politics – cut through.

It may not be true, but Russia’s return to the fray as the global bad guy may mean the left and hard left will struggle to explain to voters how their socialism is different from that of Vladimir Putin.

That Putin, in fact, harks more to the Imperial Russian glory of Peter the Great than to the dark, collectivised age of Joseph Stalin matters not a jot.

He famously said the death of communism was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th Century, and linking socialism to communism is not hard to do.

Fears are not rational. And Sinn Féin grasps this danger. You can see it in Mary Lou McDonald’s volte-face regarding the expulsion of the Russian ambassador. If nothing else, the opposition leader can sense the way the wind may blow.

But if the Ukraine war offers opportunity for Mr Martin, it also offers risk. The ensuing cost-ofliving crisis will exacerbate the inequities that the main opposition party, already riding high on the flood of a tide, can further exploit.

MICHEáL Martin can seem remote and lacking in an understanding of the challenges that modern families face in housing, health and childcare. And what can a man who has been chauffeur-driven in a free luxury car for a quarter of a century know about the cost of filling a tank of petrol?

Housing, health and now the cost of living: It is a heady mix of complaints for an electorate.

That Mr Martin realises this you can see in his Government’s U-turn over a market intervention in fuel prices – and in his strong words on price-gouging. Those moves came only after it dawned on the Government that either they intervene this week or risk the effect of images of them on their St Patrick’s Day jollies around the world while fuel prices continued to spiral upwards.

That price spiral may well still happen, but at least the Government cannot be accused of inaction – and the blame can be shunted onto oil companies.

So both Mr Martin and Ms

McDonald are walking the same uncertain line, trying to deal with two sides of the same coin simultaneously, never quite sure on which side it will fall.

As such, Mr Martin’s global tour comes at a crucial time, although it is not destined to be all handshakes and smiles.

International sanctions will play a role, and the moral influence of our Taoiseach, with his unique access this week to the Oval Office, is certain to be admired. But our influence will be minimal in global terms.

Ireland, still neutral and virtually unarmed, must confine itself to subtle, non-violent verbal quarrels.

Geopolitics and domestic politics have changed forever. There will be no patronising, wholly benign welcome.

Government sources indicate that the Taoiseach and his ministerial colleagues have encountered renewed pressure from the Great Powers, since the invasion of Ukraine, to rethink our neutrality. The pressure has been both public and private.

Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney – the minister who has unwittingly benefited most from these foreign tragedies – appeared to bow to those pressures last week.

He told a Dáil Committee: ‘Let me be very clear: in relation to what’s happening in Ukraine, we are not neutral. In fact we are actively funding and supplying equipment to the Ukrainian military to help them defend themselves and the civilians of their country,’ he said.

You can’t be a little bit neutral. This statement will have to be expanded on by the Government.

Our neutrality survived pressure from Winston Churchill in a truly existential conflagration, and the Irish people will consider our neutral status with greater wisdom than many of our political figures.

Caught between foreign powers with less patience for the nuances of our neutrality policy and a domestic electorate au fait with every subtlety of it, Mr Martin has remained impressively diplomatic.

NEUTRALITY is of course a big issue for the left – and in the current global context, one with a huge downside for those of an anti-Nato bent. Recent polls show that the first flush of love for Sinn Féin may have lost something of its ardour.

As I studied the poll figures with greater clarity, a cautionary line from Hilaire Belloc came to me: ‘Always keep a-hold of Nurse for fear of finding something worse.’

Since they took office in an unprecedented coalition of Civil War partners, Mr Martin and Tánaiste Leo Varadkar have dealt with pestilence in the guise of the coronavirus pandemic. And the Irish voters see this.

I know it is early days in this new era of war. But history shows – logic shows – that when a great threat is real and apparent, voters are far less inclined to dramatic change.

Our society has witnessed an unbroken run of conservative, centrist rule since the foundation of the State. Seismic 2020 election percentages for Sinn Féin and successive opinion polls indicated that the Irish electorate was on the cusp of choosing a possibly exciting, yet entirely untried, experiment in hard left, populist rule. Sinn Féin was coming.

Now? The war in Ukraine has changed the world forever. The nuclear capability of Russia will prevent a widespread conflagration. Yet the global economy – almost unanimously and almost overnight – has turned the world’s 11th-largest economy into a pariah. There has been an extraordinary outbreak of consensus. All bar China are agreed in their condemnation. Germany has cast aside its pacifism.

Is this the point at which Ireland decides to take an entirely new path in government? Do we now turn to Sinn Féin, which will be a high-tax, high-spend, socialist experiment, during an era of war and unfinished pestilence?

Micheál Martin is gambling that we won’t. Ultimately though, the gamble will not be his but ours.

There was war here once, when we fought for our freedom, sovereign government and the right to vote for who we wanted to govern us. World events are reinforcing what we may have forgotten – that gambling at the polls is for the highest of stakes.