“Is Ireland’s peacekeeping legacy at risk?
A few weeks ago I spoke via Zoom with Prof Roger Mac Ginty (Durham University), a key contributor to the 2023 Consultative Forum on International Security Policy, to unpack Irish neutrality, the future of UN peacekeeping, and the government’s push to scrap the triple lock.
We discuss the OSCE’s untapped potential, a “weak” UN Secretary-General, Europe’s abdication on Ukraine, and why cross-party consensus on defence matters more than ever. A sharp, honest look at Ireland’s place in a fracturing world order.”
You can listen to the podcast episode via this webpage or this Spotify link.
Here is a short video preview of the podcast on YouTube:
Here is an AI constructed transcript of our conversation:
MOONEY ON POLITICS Discussion with Prof Roger Mac Ginty
Final corrected transcript for Spotify upload (complete, 00:00:00–00:29:47)
MOONEY ON POLITICS
Discussion with Prof Roger Mac Ginty
DEREK MOONEY – introduction:
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Mooney on Politics podcast. And in this episode, I am having a discussion, having a chat with Roger Mac Ginty. (Bio in link)
Roger is the Professor in Defence, Development and Diplomacy in the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University. We talk about Irish defence issues. Roger was a contributor to the 2023 consultation process. I think Roger has a lot of very interesting things to say on peacekeeping, on our military neutrality, on the importance of multilateralism and the importance of the United Nations. This was recorded about two weeks ago, and I’ll talk to you at the end.
Derek Mooney:
I’m delighted to have Professor Roger Mac Ginty with me today. Roger’s one of the world’s leading scholars on peace and conflict studies, the editor of the journal Peacebuilding. But more importantly, for the purposes of today’s conversation, he was a participant in and a key contributor to Ireland’s Consultative Forum on International Security Policy in 2023. He’s written widely about the role that countries like Ireland can play in international peacekeeping. And in particular, he’s advocated for Ireland that it should have an active stance that is outward looking, pro-peace, able to weather shocks and useful to the international community. So I want to explore with Roger what it looks like in practice and if Ireland has a future as a peacekeeping nation. So Roger, thank you very much for joining me today.
PROF ROGER MAC GINTY:
Great to be here. Thanks for the invitation.
DEREK MOONEY:
We start out right at the deep end. You contributed to the 2023 Consultative Forum on International Security Policy that Micheál Martin set up after he became Minister for Defence and Foreign Affairs. What’s your read of where Irish public opinion, but more importantly, where policymakers stand on what we call our military neutrality and Ireland’s role in peacekeeping?
PROF ROGER MAC GINTY:
Well, it’s an interesting one because public opinion is fairly forthright in supporting the status quo. I think the last opinion poll showed 77% in favour of military neutrality. That figure hasn’t changed. It’s been pretty consistent. It contrasts a little, I think, with what one hears from policy discussion and some political discussion. And in a way, that’s fairly understandable because I suspect that when ministers and policymakers travel to Europe, they’re hearing a different story. They’re hearing stories about the Ukraine war, about the need to take defensive measures. So there’s, in a sense, some sort of disjuncture, I suspect, between public opinion and some policy and political opinion. The other thing to mention is I’m not entirely sure to what extent many of the public are aware of the distinction between neutrality and military non-alignment.
DEREK MOONEY:
Frequent criticism of Irish public policy is that we use the terms neutrality and military neutrality as if they were interchangeable. And if you go back to Frank Aiken’s time, are we strictly speaking more a non-aligned country? Because we’re not neutral. We’re not neutral on what’s happening in Ukraine. We’re not neutral on what’s happening in the Middle East. But I think the public opinion is a little bit more sophisticated, where it wouldn’t be on top of the detail. But for example, you say that opinion polls strongly favour the policy of military neutrality. But opinion polls also support greater investment in defence. And I think the public are capable of holding two supposedly contrasting opinions at the same time. And I think that’s what comes across. But where does that put Ireland in terms of its role in peacekeeping? It’s one of the things we prided ourselves on. I think our first peacekeeping mission was 1958. I think we’re one of the leading countries in the world in terms of continuous service. Right up to, I think, 2010, we would have had about 830 overseas at any given moment. Now, the world has changed since then, and things have changed in the United Nations since then. Versus what our capacity and what we’re doing — what would you see Ireland’s role in international peacekeeping, and is the United Nations the only vehicle for that, or should we be looking at other vehicles?
PROF ROGER MAC GINTY:
First, just to go back very slightly, I don’t see any contradiction between neutrality and having an active defence stance, investment in the military. The state of United Nations peacekeeping is at a critical juncture. There have been no new UN peacekeeping missions. The opportunities for countries to send peacekeepers are diminishing. A peacekeeping mission ended in Darfur last year. UNIFIL will end next year. So peacekeeping is in transition. Ireland is the 4th largest European contributor to peacekeeping. Now it’s 320-something troops. Countries like Rwanda, Nepal and Bangladesh are sending 4,000 troops to some of the larger missions in Africa.
So I think the UN role is changing. There may not be as many opportunities for boots-on-the-ground type peacekeeping through the UN, but I still think that countries like Ireland really have an investment in multilateralism. And what peacekeeping does is it signals an interest in states coming together under the mantle of the United Nations to try to solve, or at least manage, international problems in a cooperative way. So it sends a very good signal.
But of course, the UN isn’t the only game in town. We have an act of war in Europe, as we all know, and we have this platform, the OSCE, which is hugely underused. It’s a platform for diplomacy. Russia is a member of the OSCE, and we know from all of the evidence that the most important way that wars end is by using permanent platforms for negotiation. So I think countries like Ireland and many others have an opportunity to invest in diplomacy, to invest in negotiated settlements, and to be that outlier.
At a time when European states are investing heavily in defence and investing political capital in securitizing everything and talking themselves into World War III, there is an opportunity for smaller countries to say, hang on a minute, we’re in danger of talking ourselves over the precipice. Can we investigate ways of de-escalating rather than securitizing everything? Can we investigate ways in which diplomacy can bring an end to the war in Ukraine? And if I may just continue on Ukraine, I think what we’ve seen is a massive abdication of European statecraft.
The European position on the war in Ukraine is to let the capricious Donald Trump sort it out. And we know that he’s occupied with the war in Iran, that he changes his mind, he flip-flops between supporting Ukraine and apparently supporting Putin. And all the time European leaders are engaging in the politics of condemnation. And this war of attrition, which no one is winning, is dragging on and on. This huge sore on the edge of Europe is actually a disgrace to European leaders. And I think Ireland has a role, as other states have, in saying, well, is there a diplomatic way forward? I don’t mean an easy way out for President Putin, but is there a way of investigating a European peace mission? Is there a way of trying to provide support for Ukraine, but also diplomatic options for other states to get beyond this war?
DEREK MOONEY:
And that kind of comes back to this — you’re saying the model of peacekeeping has changed. That’s partly the United Nations, because of internal problems there, but primarily — we’ve been blunt about it — it’s the Security Council, but also that the United Nations, in recent years — I’m not talking about recent years, the last 20 or 30 years — has basically farmed out, or franchised out, peacekeeping to regional organizations. So the mission in Chad, which was in response to Darfur, was a European mission under United Nations mandate. So it’s actually the mandate — it’s not that the United Nations establishes these missions anymore, it’s that they mandate them. But then you talk about things like the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. It could have a capacity to mandate a mission. Just explain a little bit more about the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. How does that function, and where is the potential relevance for Ireland?
PROF ROGER MAC GINTY:
Well, it’s a long-standing platform organization. It existed during the Cold War, and we tend to forget about the duration and the depth and intensity of the Cold War. And it’s a standing platform that states can use to meet. And I don’t think that any one platform, whether it’s NATO, EU, OSCE or the United Nations, should have a monopoly. I think states should use whatever diplomatic platforms work. But I think there is something deeply dysfunctional about a lot of diplomatic activity at the moment.
Clearly, the United Nations Permanent Five have a dysfunctional setup. And a lot of states who have been waiting on the threshold, wanting a seat at the UN Security Council, have realized, actually, that’s not a game we want to play. So countries like India or Nigeria aren’t actually pushing for a seat on the Security Council, because they’re happy enough being regional hegemons. They’re happy enough, and they don’t particularly want the responsibility that would come if they had a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. What we’re seeing is a movement away from the United Nations. It’s been deliberately hamstrung by those states who are the chief custodians of the organization. And we’re seeing a shift away from multilateralism towards minilateralism.
We’re seeing small constellations of states getting together to deal with particular issues, whether it’s conflict or migration, etc. We’re seeing, in a sense, a variable geometry of states moving away from these permanent platforms to less permanent constellations. And I think that’s actually problematic, because many of the problems that we face — these wicked transnational problems, such as climate change, such as human migration — we don’t, as a species, have an answer to those. But the only possibility of having an answer to those is through those larger platforms in which multiple states are members.
DEREK MOONEY:
Again, going back to the United Nations — the structure of the Permanent Five is a function of when the United Nations was formed, in 1945/46, in response to the Second World War. Is there a fix to what’s happening in the United Nations? What is the role for smaller countries like Ireland? I mean, again, I mentioned him earlier, Frank Aiken. Is this where Ireland can be to the forefront for smaller countries — particularly because the protection of multilateralism, and by multilateralism I mean collective action, meaning many countries rather than just one imperial power.
PROF ROGER MAC GINTY:
I think that the UN is one of those organizations we would massively miss if it were ever to collapse, and we would need to reinvent it again. In terms of fixes, let’s face it, we’ve had a weak Secretary-General. In times past, you could roll the name of the Secretary-General off your tongue. Now most of us have to pause and think for a second or two to remember who it is. We should have a new Secretary-General next year. Let’s hope it’s someone who is forthright and is able to defend the organization. It’s also worth saying that the UN, and particularly UN peacekeeping missions, became overloaded.
They had too many responsibilities tacked on to their mandate. And in a sense, they were set up to fail. So I think one route to reinvigorating the UN is for it actually to be much more realistic — to cut its cloth in terms of resources, and to make sure that the mandates of peacekeeping missions are not overloaded with unrealistic objectives. And I think for small states, including Ireland, the most important thing they can do is be active members of the United Nations — to use the platform to advocate for the SDGs. Remember those? They’ve fallen off the agenda. But that is a route map to human progress. It’s a route map to human security. And it’s a route map to trying to staunch environmental degradation, which is impacting on all of us. Key is actually to use the United Nations to celebrate the United Nations, and to counter the narrative that sees the United Nations as a drain on resources — somehow a blocker rather than a facilitator to solving problems.
DEREK MOONEY:
With the SDGs, you mean the developmental goals — greater opportunity across the board?
PROF ROGER MAC GINTY:
Yeah, the Sustainable Development Goals, the successors of the Millennium Development Goals, and they cover everything from education, to peace and security, to saving the oceans. They really are quite a sophisticated list of goals that actually no one could argue with. You know, who doesn’t want to see children educated? Who doesn’t want the planet to have access to clean water? And their main aim was to set a series of goals that states would then be able to meet and match.
DEREK MOONEY:
Going back to the practical, or pragmatic, side of peacekeeping in terms of what we do — one of the reasons why Ireland has a decent reputation abroad, or traditionally had a decent reputation abroad, is because it kind of put its money where its mouth was. It sent troops into difficult situations. We continued — we did that, we invested, and our peacekeepers bought us a seat at various tables. Are we at risk of losing that through underinvestment in defence? Our defence numbers — we should have around 10 and a half thousand, that was cut to 9 and a half thousand in 2015, but we’re still below 8,000. Is there a price to be paid for underinvesting in defence? Never mind national defence — I’m just talking about the international realm, or the peacekeeping realm.
PROF ROGER MAC GINTY:
I think for any state to contribute large numbers to peacekeeping missions, they need a logistical ability. They need the force. They need a force that can be rotated. So there are standards that are required to participate in peacekeeping. You know, the key investment, though, has been the willingness of the government to say yes, and actually the bravery of the men and women who have served in peacekeeping missions over the years. If you look over the past year or so, what men and women from the Defence Forces have endured in southern Lebanon, it’s quite phenomenal. I think the key problem facing the Defence Forces is one of recruitment and retention.
And it’s an interesting one, in that despite political leaders across Europe talking up the need to securitize, the need to invest in defence, virtually every country in Europe is suffering, particularly, a retention problem. If you look at the level of pay of the Irish Defence Forces, it actually competes fairly well with European averages. So to me, the problem is probably not so much pay. It’s one of working conditions and living conditions. So it’s housing, facilities. And of course, if the economy is going relatively well, there are always opportunities outside the Defence Forces. So I think maybe the story of retention is more about the facilities on offer, the professional development opportunities on offer, and also the diversification that we’re seeing away from sort of traditional “boots on the ground” defence, towards cyber and other threats coming down the line.
DEREK MOONEY:
No, I think you’re absolutely right on that. I’m trying to think of the last set of figures I saw, but I think they’re from last year. And as far as I remember, the number of people applying to join the Defence Forces is still on a par with where it used to be. I mean, I know we were recruiting a smaller number, but as far as I know, about 5,000 people applied to join the Defence Forces. I think it’s more a retention issue. But it’s also in terms of specialities, particularly in cyber and that whole range. Kind of bring you to where we go next, or what’s happening next.
And I’m not trying to drag you into the row here, but as I said, we’ve become a little bit fixated on the triple lock: United Nations mandate, cabinet approval and Dáil approval. Fine Gael, I think around 2020, had kind of come out against the triple lock, and then changed their mind on it. Up till 2020, Fianna Fáil was very much in favour of the triple lock, and saw it as an expression of military neutrality. But now the government is saying that it wants to get rid of the triple lock. Is that a good signal to be sending? And what will getting rid of the triple lock do for Ireland, and what will it contribute? Or is there something we should be looking at — reforming it and keeping that explicit reference to multilateralism in our legislation?
PROF ROGER MAC GINTY:
The first thing to say is that sending men and women of the Defence Forces into harm’s way is perhaps one of the most important decisions that any government would have to make. And therefore it seems important that there are checks and balances, that a government can’t just do this on a whim. So checks and balances are very important. The Irish triple lock is quite peculiar, in a way, by international standards. But I think it does send an important signal, that troops would be sent under the mantle of some form of international authority, for the greater good, in defence of common security and peace. And I think that’s an important signal to send.
To do away with it — it really depends how it might be done away with. The Fianna Fáil 2024 manifesto promised sensible reform of the triple lock. Everybody’s in favour of sensible reform. Goodness knows what sensible reform actually means. I think it’s about the signal that this sends, and what it might be replaced with. If it’s replaced with some other form of oversight, that might be a good thing. But to simply do away with it is yet another case of a state walking away from the United Nations on this particular issue. It’s undercutting the very notion of multilateralism. So I suspect caution is required because of the signal that it gives.
DEREK MOONEY:
My own view on this is that the public mightn’t fully understand what the triple lock means, but there is a comfort in knowing, as you say, that our people are going overseas in pursuit of a noble cause, and to aid people who are in a difficult situation. So when we were involved, we were dealing with the fallout of the Darfur famine. Lebanon speaks for itself. We’ve been there for a long time, in harm’s way, in the UNDOF mission on the Golan Heights, and a good list of various missions, including the Congo, et cetera. I hear what the government says, which is, look, there hasn’t been a new United Nations mandate.
So that now looks like there’s going to be no reissue. So we see it in Lebanon — they’re not going to renew the existing mandates. So what do we do in that case? And my own view is that we then look at redefining and putting in new definitions, rather than just getting rid of the whole edifice completely, the whole mechanism. And is the OSCE a possible option for that — to broaden the range of missions we can send troops on, or to broaden the list of global or international agencies who can actually mandate these missions, or authorize them? Because the government says that they’re going to have these missions in accordance with the United Nations Charter, but I’m not too sure how you define that in law.
PROF ROGER MAC GINTY:
True. And the Charter was a wonderful document for 1945. I’m not entirely sure how fit for purpose parts of it are at the moment. And much of it, of course — particularly if you read the preamble of the Charter — much of it is unfulfilled. Ireland is a small boat in a difficult sea. And I think it has to be quite deft. It has to be quite nimble. And one of the things that I think everybody would agree on is that we’re living in an era of uncertainty. And I think eras of uncertainty mean that states have to be very careful, and perhaps not rush into changes that they might have to live with for quite some time.
We can look around and see that a number of international organizations, multilateral organizations, really are all at sea. You know, the European project is stuttering. NATO is a busted flush. International organizations are really struggling to work out what’s happening. And I think it’s prudent to hang on, to survey the international peace and conflict landscape, and maybe not rush into radical changes, because it’s not very clear where we’re going to be in five years, or 10 years. You opened by mentioning the 2023 consultation on Irish security policy. 2023 seems like 30 years ago at the moment.
We’ve had the Trump presidency. We’ve had the intensification of the war in Ukraine. We’ve got the step back from multilateralism, not only with regards to the United Nations and Trump, but we see new defence alliances. We’ve seen one earlier this week between the Saudis, Pakistan and Turkey. We’ve seen the United Arab Emirates withdraw from OPEC. This is an era of great instability. And I think it requires a steady nerve and a constant reassessment of the security landscape.
DEREK MOONEY:
In that context, it’s very hard to present abandoning the triple lock as high principle. I can see why people regard this as a pragmatic response, but it is one of retreat, and just pulling back from very difficult solutions and very difficult situations. Again, this is a debate that still has to be — I think one of the —
PROF ROGER MAC GINTY:
Noticeable things, if I may say, Derek, is that there probably hasn’t been that debate. You know, you see op-eds in the papers, often from retired personnel from the Defence Forces, but there hasn’t really been a public debate, as far as I can see, on the triple lock. It’s one of so many issues in Ireland’s history — it’s one of those issues that maybe has been kicked down the road, and there might be a difference of opinion between some amongst the political classes and commentators, and the bulk of public opinion.
DEREK MOONEY:
It is one of those issues where perhaps the goal should be to try and get a multi-party approach. It builds up some political consensus, rather than having a government-versus-opposition binary stance on that. One of the benefits of having that buy-in is that support for missions, up to now, has been very, very strong — public support for us — because it was seen to be largely, not absolutely, but largely cross-party support. And I think you sacrifice that at your peril. I think there is a law of unintended consequences, because it says, well, look, we’re a sovereign country. We should be able to decide where our troops go by ourselves. We shouldn’t need the imprimatur of the United Nations, and we shouldn’t need the approval of the United Nations. Well, yes, we could decide where our troops go by ourselves, but our capacity to deploy them is reduced. But number two, any country can send its troops where it wants to go — but that’s known as an invasion. It’s not exactly high principle. Sometimes I just think it’s kind of dressed up the wrong way around. Listen, Roger, thank you very, very much for joining me. I should have pointed out at the start — okay, you’re based at Durham University, but the accent isn’t particularly Durham.
PROF ROGER MAC GINTY:
No, I’m from Tyrone, living in Fermanagh, and enduring a fairly wet summer — and enjoying it as well.
DEREK MOONEY:
Absolutely. Listen, Roger, thank you very much for taking the time to join us, and I’ll talk to you again very, very soon. Cheers.
PROF ROGER MAC GINTY:
Thanks a million.
Conclusion – by DEREK MOONEY:
So, as I said, that was my discussion with Roger Mac Ginty. I think there were some important points there. But I think the point that Roger makes is fairly straightforward. Now, he doesn’t say that we should keep the triple lock as it stands, but he does argue for sensible reform of it — but most importantly, for maintaining a clear commitment to multilateralism. And he cautions us against walking away from the United Nations.
Yes, it’s a flawed organization, but as a small country, the United Nations is something which, as he mentions, I think, in the podcast — if the United Nations ceased to exist, we would be looking, within a short space of time, to recreate it. And indeed, isn’t that what happened with the United Nations versus the earlier League of Nations? I think for a modern, outward-looking, international small country like Ireland, it’s important to have a mechanism, an international forum, for the pacific resolution of international disputes — a forum where the rule of law is of the utmost importance. I hear all the issues that the Taoiseach, Martin, raises regarding the fact that the United Nations Security Council hasn’t created a new mission, and that there are problems, clearly, within the United Nations Security Council.
I think simply expunging it from our laws is an error. It is not an argument against the triple lock to say no other country has a similar mechanism. The fact that other countries haven’t seen fit to do what Ireland has done is not a criticism of Ireland — it’s a criticism of them. Yes, international rules change, and so should we adapt to those — but adapting is not abolition. And in the past — I think in ’93 and 2006 — we amended and updated the triple lock, and we should do the same again. The other point, and it’s one that’s been made politically, is that the triple lock underpins a lot of the commitments we made at the Lisbon Treaty and other treaties.
And these commitments — not commitments we made to Europe, but commitments we made to our own citizens. It is one thing to say, look, that was 20 years ago, the situation has changed — that’s why you reform things. I think it’s a completely different thing to say, well, look, the situation has changed since, so we are now getting rid of that commitment. I think that’s a mistake. And I think it’s a mistake that will not play well with the public. And I think, particularly for Fianna Fáil TDs and for Fianna Fáil senators, I would think very, very long and hard. I would again urge the Taoiseach, the Tánaiste, the Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Minister for Defence to look to create a cross-party consensus, because I think that is absolutely essential for our next steps forward.
So I hope you enjoyed this podcast. I hope you’ve learned something from it. And you mightn’t agree with me at the end of it all, but I think you’ll see that there is a principled concern as to what the government is doing at the moment. So thank you very much for listening, and we’ll talk to you again, hopefully, in about 10 days’ time. Until then — cheers. Bye bye.
Speakers: Derek Mooney (Host), Prof Roger Mac Ginty (Guest)
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