Ireland having 0 military capabilities, and being completely dependent on NATO, while being extremely opinionated, on how and what NATO does, always irked me deeply.
Ireland doesn't have exactly zero military capabilities. For example they have a military base in Lebanon. They have a decades long solidarity with Hezbollah and solidarity demonstrations are commonplace
No offense but how is that not obvious by second grade. Don't have a big mouth if you don't have a big stick too. Ireland doesn't have quiet opinions, but a rather big mouth about other nations' foreign policy.
"Armed debate" is a misread. The point of my comment was that there is little sympathy for people that bite the hand that feeds them or talk themselves into situations they don't have the wherewithal to navigate.
Biting the hand that feeds is a nonsense characterization of disagreeing - even loudly - with the person who aids you. We do not own each other, as much as many of us would like to.
Not that I'm recommending it but Putin's regime seems to behave much like the mafia and will get along with people who pay it protection money or ally with it.
Can you point me to some examples? I have not followed closely but it seems that Ireland is on the same page as the other EU states in regards to supporting Ukraine.
I'm also curious about what you consider a "very extreme opinion" to be in this regard.
Here is a specific example where an Irish MEP specifically speaks against sanctions on Russia and against NATO donating any weapons to Ukraine in front of the EU parliament.
Ireland doesn't have 0 military capabilities, they have enough of a military to conduct peacekeeping missions elsewhere, which they don't need to do. They just don't have the ability to defend an invasion, but they do certainly have a military that does good in the world.
Who said without others? You don't need tanks for peacekeeping missions. Or jets for that matter.
FWIW I was in Kosovo and served in a multionational task force including the Irish.
they were based next to some chicken farm, lord knows why, you could smell them from miles away, if you were unlucky.
Their "peacekeeping" missions are somewhere between utterly impotent / useless and actively counterproductive. Playing dumb and doing nothing while Hezbollah uses you as cover to launch missiles over the border from a couple hundred meters away is not keeping the peace.
That assumes that their mission is to stop anything. UNRWA's sole mission (like most large-scale nonprofits - not suggesting they're unique) is to continue to procure money for its 30,000 or so salaried posts.
Additionally, it assumes that the Irish, who broadly as a people support national liberation movements, would even want to prevent Hezbollah from rebuilding, even if they could.
Notably thousands of Irish soldiers did fight the Germans in WW2 but via joining the British Army... an act that was frowned upon at the times. Many were killed.
I had heard of the blacklist, but thought that it was for those who deserted the Irish military to join the British. Punishing deserters is understandable, no matter the motive.
That said, if I understand the article correctly, those who did this were punished worse than deserters who did not go fight?!?
A lot of governments took the side of the Nazis. Including the EU's founder, Robert Schuman, ex-Nazi collaborator of the French Vichy government. But that is nothing compared to many others.
Things get so much worse. The Dutch Child protection agency has in it's historical archives, not just that they collaborated with implementing the holocaust against children, but actually organized it. Jewish (and various other groups, like Romani) children were "invited" to summer camps, that turned out to be death camps (and the "east front", which you also didn't return from). They even set a trap to deport Jewish and mentally and physically disabled children to extermination camps, including a number of their own personnel, and even went so far as to hunt their own personnel that "chose the side of the children".
Austrian child protection agency selected children to be sent to death camps. That, Austrian psychiatry before and during the holocaust, is where Autism comes from. The first children diagnosed with Autism were not just sent to death camps, that was the only purpose of the diagnosis of Autism. To mark the child for death to "protect (something about race that I will not repeat)".
In case you ever wonder why the child protection agencies of those countries still reserve the right to lie about the death of children, even today, that is why. Because both mass-murdered children out of racism, and if a concrete case, of which there are many, were to come to court even today ...
And yet, it gets worse. And extremely confusing. Many things boil down to what everybody actually kind of knows. Ideas, especially implemented on the scale of a state, come from a long history and trials. Everything around WW2 was, justly and correctly, blamed on the Nazis. Nazis did those things. But they got the idea, and in many cases personnel, from somewhere. And a LOT of groups have used that to absolve themselves of what they did before, often long before, WW2. Look up "industrial psychiatry" sometime.
Well, one can look at this as at least a step in the right direction, compared to the active collaboration with Germany during WW1 by the people who became Irish government by the time of WW2 arrived.
The two world wars were not the same. WW1 was a stupid war that happened for stupid reasons, and there were no real moral differences between the sides. Many nations tried to use the war as an opportunity for independence by collaborating with the opposing side. Some of them were successful.
In Finland, we still call infantry Jägers in honor of those who went to Germany to receive military training and to fight against Russia.
https://rebelbreeze.com/2024/09/21/dublin-demonstration-in-s...