Is it time to join Nato

My reading of it is Irish neutrality was very much about the British relationship and it’s understandable given the time.

I mean if you look at where Ireland was pre WWII. We had only gained independence in 1922. There was a rather serious retaliatory trade war which ran right up into 1938 and the attitudes towards the U.K. and Anglo Irish relations were at a very low point.

We had only been independent for 17 years in 1939 and the priority of the state was to maintain that. I mean think of it from perspective of today. It was only as far back as 2005 is from where we are standing.

The memories of the 1910s and 20s were raw. There was a justifiable fear the U.K. might have just concluded Ireland was a strategic risk and taken us back over again.

Our views also softened as the war progressed and as the Americans came on board and the German atrocities became clear.

WWII was a watershed in Europe and the impact was profound and transformational. It was also the end of imperial Britain and what emerged as post war Britain was far more relatable to Ireland than what had gone before. It was more egalitarian, more open minded and everything was beginning to change. The whole continental European outlook was totally different too - gone were the arrogant empires and what emerged was a continent of small and medium outward looking countries determined never to allow that to happen again and the beginning of the European institutions which we were able to plug into by the 1970s.

I think Irish neutrality morphed from being a pragmatic thing about preserving a fragile independence into what has become a bit of a mantra and a philosophical point of view that is perhaps on far shakier ground that we sometimes project it to be.

It’s a bit lazy to see the 1930s as if they’re the 2020s though. Ireland and Britain weren’t the same countries that they are today in many respects and the relationship was immediately post conflict.

You can’t really be neutral in a situation like Ukraine and we absolutely aren’t. Ireland has very much been on the EU side, to the point that the Russians have labelled us an “unfriendly nation” and that isn’t a negative. There’s absolutely no way we could take a fence sitting position on this and we have not done so.

It seems our neutrality is more about being passive / non militaristic but sometimes it does seem a bit like NIMBYism too. We have developed a notion that we are irrelevant in any strategic sense and that everyone loves us and will come to our rescue in a crisis. It’s not a theory I would like to test and I think the Russians being off the coast, as low risk as that was, did send a lot of chills down spines.

Also in areas like intelligence and cyber security we were left very exposed year when the HSE was attacked. Yes, they might have left the barn doors wide open, but our cyber security strategy seems to be weak to the point of being non existent.

We are hosting major international IT infrastructure and making good money out of revenue and jobs because of that and it’s only here because we are in the EU and are a big gateway into Europe and I think we do have a duty of care there.

I don't agree that we'd have developed any faster than we did. I think that's a moot point to be quite honest. We received a bit of Marshall plan aid from 1947 to 1957 and had no issues whatsoever with any of our stances having impacted trade.

We also emerged from WWII relatively unscathed compared to most of continental Europe and Britain which had to do a lot of infrastructural rebuilding. I'm not sure I'd agree that having to rebuild flattened cities was something that would have been beneficial to the Irish economy. They saw a lot of spend on infrastructure, we didn't as it wasn't smashed up. The downside was it was also pretty much as it was in the early 1930s.

From the 1950s onward, our economy began to grow albeit slowly and things were made much more outward looking, particularly after TK Whitaker's First Programme for Economic Expansion (the Grey Book) set us on the path towards welcoming FDI in a big way.

There's also a rather distorted notion that Ireland was highly protectionist and inwards looking after independence. It wasn't really anymore so than other countries at the time. There wasn't a concept of globalised or intra-European rules based trade. A lot of it was about empires, military might and extreme protectionism. Small countries tended to get buffeted around by that and we certainly did.

We were a relatively poor, mostly still agrarian economy and had left the British world and were being heavily shunned for having done so. It was a pretty serious structural upheaval for the Irish economy.

If you look back, a lot of our early infrastructural projects tendered for major international contractors in a very modern way. We were trading and exporting where we could. We tried to bring in knowledge exchange type arrangements by encouraging manufacturing subsidiaries and all sorts of stuff.

There was a huge degree of interest in reaching out to continental Europe and I think we tend to underestimate how much activity went on in the late 50s and 1960s especially in the run up to our membership of the EEC. A lot of our focus tends to fixate on Anglo-Irish relations. There was a lot more going on.

Our economy began to flourish when it was plugged into the rules-based trade environment that was largely fostered by early pre-EU institutions and a change of global attitudes to trade more generally - and the rise of smaller European countries setting some of those agendas too.

I just find there's a big tendency to keep comparing 1920s/30s/40s Ireland to modern times without seeing the context it operated in.

I have been heretofore terribly against our country joining NATO. It wasn’t that I was unaware that Putin wasn’t some threat to more “eastern” countries. Could be said I had my head in the sand. My mother always held that NATO was not alone provocative but allowed USA say too much power; she was around for the beginning of it. Now I think it is pragmatically necessary.