We know that the majority of people in Ireland want Ireland to keep its neutrality. Yet the Irish government is intent on doing the reverse. During its current Presidency of the EU Council, despite the ongoing genocide in Palestine and the escalating militarisation of Europe, it is not even putting on its usual show of speaking out of the two sides of its sovereign mouth. It is shamelessly gung-ho for the official EU line: rearming Europe, more state spending on the military and deeper involvement in the EU’s military operations. In taking this stand, it is also further eroding the two ruling parties’ political credibility – already at a historical low – and this will return to haunt them.
Genocide
The EU’s complicity in the genocide in Palestine is in plain sight. Germany and Italy, backed by several Eastern European states, have blocked any action whatsoever against Israel. As Israel’s murderous tactics spread to the West Bank, the EU continues to remain silent. Worse still, the European Commission recently announced nearly €900 million in funding for the rebuilding of Gaza, thus collaborating with, amongst others, members of US President Donald Trump’s so-called ‘Board of Peace’.
The EU-Israel alliance remains unshakeable. The Association Agreement, which governs the EU’s special relations with Israel, remains in place. Yet Al Jazeera reports that, already in 2017, the EU was told that it had legal grounds to suspend it because Israel’s devastation of Gaza included €150 million of EU funded infrastructure.
Since October 2023, it is estimated that there have been over 335,000 deaths in Gaza, over 1.9 million Palestinians displaced, thousands of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories imprisoned, tortured or ‘disappeared’ and over 1000 people shot by the IDF and settlers. Since the so-called ‘ceasefire’ of October 2025, in Gaza and the West Bank – more than 1055 Palestinians have been killed, including 183 children, five of whom were infants under the age of one.
This conflict has seen doctors and healthcare workers, journalists, and UN staff openly targeted. The bombing of hospitals, schools of tent shelters, queues for food, ecocide, land dispossession, scholasticide are extinguishing the very social reproduction of Palestinian life.Fintan Drury makes the point that Israel’s genocide is utterly intentional and thorough, and at every stage military tactics and systematic starvation minutely engineered as part of Israel’s plan to rid Palestine of Palestinians.
EU complicity
Throughout all of this, trade between the EU and Israel, as well as the bloc’s Horizon Europe research program, have continued. The EU directly funds arms companies – to the tune of €426 million – who send arms to Israel. Germany is Israel’s second-largest arms supplier after the US, with arms export licences worth €0.88 billion between 2018 and 2022.
The EU’s unwavering support for Israel has its roots in colonialism, fuelled by racism and islamophobia. EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, spells it out : ‘Israel is closer to the European Union than any other country in the world outside Europe … Israel is … a member of the European Union, without being a member of the institutions.
France and Ireland may have placed sanctions on Israeli extremist violently pro-settler politicians like Ben Gvir, but the EU has done nothing to isolate, reprimand, or condemn the Israeli state itself.
Ireland’s Presidency of the EU Council, by being the official face of the EU’s actions, thus contributes to the white-washing of the EU-Israel death grip.
Surging militarisation
The Irish Government’s statement on its priorities for the EU Council Presidency clearly sets its perspective out:
‘New threats and new forms of warfare present serious challenges. We must work together to address these challenges, which have highlighted the need for Europe to invest in all dimensions of our own security and develop our defence capabilities. The Irish Presidency will work to advance measures that contribute to the strengthening of European security and defence.’
Being a neutral state, it seems, does not temper the Irish government’s enthusiasm and active support for militarisation and for the EU’s rearmament plan.
Firstly, the Irish government plans to remove UN approval from overseas troop deployments, overturning Ireland’s long-standing defence and neutrality framework. It proposes a shift from overseeing Irish overseas military deployments away from the UN, to the Cabinet and the Dáil only. It wants to increase the number of Irish troops which canbe deployed without a Dáil vote, from 12 to 50. Ireland will be able to participate in missions not explicitly mandated by the United Nations, including EU-led ones which increasingly operate alongside NATO. While the legislation around this – the Defence (Amendment) Bill 2026 – has now been deferred to the Autumn, mainly because of opposition to it within Fianna Fáil, the Irish government still has this controversial change in its sights.
Secondly, the FF-FG government is committed to tripling Ireland’s military expenditure. The Irish defence budget has already risen to €1.5 billion; there will be a 50% increase in baseline funding by 2028, with a long-term target funding of €3 billion.
This will bring Ireland in line with the EU Rearm Europe/Readiness 2030 plan, for which at least €800 billion will be available for ‘revitalising’ the defence sector . A further €150 billion loan money for capital funding for defence. will be available for member states. The EU’s once sacrosanct fiscal rules, which ruled out borrowing for social spending, have quickly been cast aside.
Thirdly, Irish military personnel are involved in direct weapons skills and military training for the Ukrainian army. It has even attempted to offload old, armoured vehicles, grenade launchers and machine guns to Ukraine, attempting to pass these off as non-military aid.
Yet with all this military involvement, the government peddles the line that Irish neutrality is not under threat. The ‘Russian enemy’ is the cover. Yet Ireland lies on the other side of the continent of Europe, nowhere near Russia’s ‘near abroad’. And cable security in Irish seas are probably more threatened by sharks than by the Russians.
Backing NATO
Finally, the Irish government is committing Ireland to a key role in the Ukraine Contact Defence Group – a body which US secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, openly describes as a NATO Alliance. Irish representatives have already attended roughly 30 meetings of this group, in the NATO headquarters and the US Air Command in Ramstein, Germany. It is also little known that Ireland is also committed to be part of the national maritime security strategy in the Joint Expeditionary Force – an alliance made up of 10 NATO members and led by Britain.
The Irish government is engaging ever more closely with NATO. It gives this somewhat strange commitment from a supposedly neutral state:
‘We will advance work on the proposed regulation on military mobility and […] address maritime security challenges and the security of critical infrastructure. […] We will promote close cooperation with like-minded non-EU states, the UN, OSCE and NATO.
Ireland’s 2024 Defence Policy review describes NATO as the cornerstone of collective defence of its members in Europe. EU-NATO cooperation has become ‘an indispensable pillar of EU defence’ and EU member states and NATO are ‘to achieve together their capability targets’.
The Irish government is effectively doing Trump’s bidding – i.e. that the EU should commit more spending to NATO. Such is the overlap that a spokesperson from the US Brookings Institute, commenting on the recent NATO conference at Ankara which welcomed Europe’s surging defence spending, talks about the ‘Europeanisation’ of NATO.
Arms economy
Ireland’s white paper on defence refers to the new dedicated financial instruments to support member states’ defence investments. The Irish state will sign up to this SAFE (‘Security Action for Europe’) project. This will enable them to borrow money to invest in the military, more precisely to allow ‘urgent and major investments in support of the European defence industry’. Member states already increased their defence budgets from €218 billion in 2021 to €343 billion in 2024, again something favourably referenced in the programme of the Irish Presidency.
NATO chief Mark Rutte does not hide the fact that spending more on defence means spending less on other priorities. If the people have nothing to gain from this, the lucrative arms industries do. Almost a quarter of the European Defence Fund spending ends up in the pockets of the arms giants Leonardo, Thales and Airbus. The European Defence Fund predominantly functions as a funding vehicle to strengthen the dominant position of these and other large arms companies, such as Saab, Dassault Aviation and Saran, in the EU military industrial complex.
Germany has embraced Rearm Europe because it sees state-backed defence spending as an opportunity to boost its lagging economy. It hopes that repurposing car factories – currently suffering layoffs – for military production may be a path to recouping some of its global competitiveness. Germany plans to raise defence spending to almost 3.5% of GDP by 2029, up from 2.1% in 2024, the largest military investment programmes in post war Europe. By 2029, the government aims to spend more than €100bn annually on defence equipment and maintenance.
In the cold war period, the permanent arms economy provided the basis for a capitalist boom in the second half of the last century, but things may not be as straightforward for western capital today. Western states, with their legacy of reliance on heavy armaments, are behind the curve on new technological non-kinetic warfare and this may stymie potential growth from arms investment, as other hi-tech competitors like China storm ahead.
Protest the Irish Presidency
Many people across Europe want no truck with the war agenda. School students in Germany have protested the introduction of conscription. Italian and French dockworkers have blocked arms shipments to Israel. A month ago thousands protested in Brussels against Europe and NATO’s rearmament plans.
In Ireland, public money in the North has already been unlawfully allocated to help fund parts for Israeli F-35 fighter jets which could be used to commit genocide.
On the first day of the opening of the Irish Presidency in Dublin there was a loud and angry demonstration – although prevented by the Gardaí from getting near Dublin Castle. When Ursula von der Leyen visited UCC for a meeting of the Commissioners, on 2-3 July, Cork Palestine Solidarity Campaign organised a protest. The area was sealed off, highly securitised and the university closed.
Governments have become increasingly repressive towards demonstrators. In Germany, on 13 July, Greta Thunberg was detained at a protest in Berlin outside the German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall. The “Ulm 5”, activists from the UK, Ireland, Spain, and Germany, are on trial in Germany for breaking into an Elbit Systems subsidiary office in the city of Ulm in September 2025. Pre-trial, the activists were placed in detention in high-security facilities at the Stammheim prison complex in Stuttgart and put in 23-hour lock-in. In court they have been handcuffed and put behind glass panels which prevent them from having direct communication with their lawyers. This treatment has drawn international criticism and intervention from politicians and human rights groups. Irish citizen, Daniel Tatlow-Devally, has received active support from People Before Profit, Sinn Féin and others, but the Government still refuses to send official observers to the trial.
A campaign has come together in Ireland to oppose the war agenda that the Irish EU Council Presidency represents. It has brought together solidarity groups, civil society organisations and citizens from across Ireland to form a coalition calling for A People’s Europe – No to Genocide and No to War.
There are protests planned during the Irish Presidency, which runs until December. An informal meeting of EU ministers responsible for defence will take place on 31 August and 1 September in Wicklow at which local groups are planning a protest. On 12-13 November there will be a gathering of top EU leaders and officials in Dublin, at which the newly formed A People’s Europe coalition is planning a protest.
The Irish government’s sickening adoption of the EU militarisation agenda and its complicity with Israel goes against the grain of the Irish people – their support for Palestine but also their commitment to peace and neutrality. At every turn, the government has refused to do anything to reprimand the Zionist state, including voting down motions to stop the Ireland-Israel football game from taking place. People on the ground are taking that fight forward and there will be Stop the Game protests during the Presidency.
Beating the drums of war has a habit of awakening a radical reaction. It was opposition to the first world war that triggered the Irish adoption of neutrality as an anti-imperialist rallying call. In 2001, the internationally supported anti-war and anti-globalisation protests at the G8 summit in Genoa drew 300,000 demonstrators which spurred on an anti- capitalist movement that opposed the neoliberalisation and militarisation of the EU at that time and inspired a whole new generation of activists.
We have seen mass demonstrations, radical activism and workers’ action again today over Palestine. War and genocide have brought out the most horrific aspects of the system; across Europe and the world people on the streets continue to show anger at the capitalist order that has enabled it. For us, the main enemy is at home: we need to challenge the ‘do nothing’ of our own government, demonstrate both locally and nationally against their and the EU’s complicity with genocide and build a movement that they cannot ignore. This is how we build a different Europe, a people’s Europe, which calls out war and genocide and stands with the enduring resistance of the Palestinian people.
To contact the People’s Europe Coalition email: anothereurope2026@gmail com.
