Ireland’s foreign minister has said the militarily neutral nation “will not be found wanting” over any future European peacekeeping mission in Ukraine, and he is to present a bill to cabinet to relax the decades-old rule on how Irish troops can be deployed.
Simon Harris, who is also defence and trade minister, said Ireland was “open” to joining a force to uphold any peace deal in Ukraine, amid growing pressure on Kyiv from the US to rapidly settle the conflict with Russia.
“Ireland has not been found wanting when it comes to opening our doors to Ukrainians fleeing conflict and also non-lethal military support,” Harris told the Financial Times. “If the circumstances arise, we will not be found wanting in terms of peacekeeping either.”
The suspension of US military aid to Kyiv, President Donald Trump’s bilateral negotiations with Moscow over the conflict and his bad-tempered meeting with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House have all added urgency to European efforts to devise their own peace plan for Ukraine.
While European countries led by France and the UK are drawing up plans for a deal, only the UK has so far committed to “boots on the ground and planes in the air” for any peacekeeping mission that would follow an end to hostilities.
Ireland’s military neutrality is a long-standing tradition that predates the second world war, and its defence spending is well below the levels of its fellow EU nations. Although Ireland has won international respect for its peacekeeping missions in countries such as Lebanon, it has faced criticism that it freeloads on its partners on defence.
Under its “triple-lock” system, Ireland requires a mandate from the UN Security Council, plus approval from its cabinet and the Irish parliament, to deploy more than 12 troops from its 9,000-strong armed forces overseas.
Harris, a former Taoiseach, will present a bill to cabinet on Tuesday to remove the requirement for UN Security Council approval and to change the number of troops requiring government and parliamentary approval to 50.
He insisted that this in no way undermined Ireland’s commitment to the UN, but that it “cannot allow” Security Council members, including Russia, a veto over Irish peacekeeping.
Sinn Féin, Ireland’s main opposition party, said it would not support the bill to change the triple lock, but the government of Taoiseach Micheál Martin has a majority in the Dáil. Martin will travel to the US next week for a meeting with Trump to coincide with the annual St Patrick’s Day celebrations.
The US last week broke with its Security Council allies to side with Russia and China in a resolution calling for a swift end to the war in Ukraine that did not mention Moscow as the aggressor or Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
Harris said the proposed changes were not triggered by the Ukraine war. “But on the peacekeeping element for Ukraine, we don’t believe we should recuse ourselves from that conversation if you got to a point where there was a peace agreement and a cessation of violence, and there was a requirement to have peacekeepers,” he said.
“That is something that the government is open to engaging in . . . We have stood with Ukraine for the last more than three years and we will not be resiling from that.”
Many Irish view the triple lock as a core part of its neutrality. An Ireland Thinks poll in the Sunday Independent last weekend found 46 per cent wanted no change, against 41 per cent in favour. The poll also found 64 per cent opposed rethinking its neutrality.
However, a similar percentage also agreed that Ireland, which expects a €24bn budget surplus this year, needed to significantly increase defence spending. It has earmarked €1.35bn this year, rising to €1.78bn by 2028 and to more than €3bn “as quickly as possible” after that.
“This is a journey that will take time, but we have increased our defence spending by 30 per cent in the last five years and doubled it within the last decade,” Harris said.
Irish troops are serving in Lebanon, the Golan Heights, Syria, Israel, Jordan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Mali and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Security Council has approved no new peacekeeping missions since 2014.