Every Irish socialist and republican knows well the words of James Connolly written in the Shan Van Vocht in 1887: "If you remove the English flag tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic, your efforts will be in vain, England will still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs."
The nationality of the capitalists, landlords, and financiers Connolly referred to may have changed between then and 2025, but the insight is as valid as ever. Within that part of Ireland that gained nominal independence, the emergence of a domestic comprador class, the failure to develop any serious indigenous Irish industry, and the complete subjugation of economic and taxation policy to US multinationals, alongside subservience to European Union economic and trade policies, casts a long shadow over the struggle for Irish self-rule today.
Ask most people whether they believe Ireland should be able to choose its own path, and they will undoubtedly tell you they do. The idea of self-determination, of Irish control over Irish destiny, of sovereignty, is close to being common sense, and widely supported across the political spectrum. Ask the same groups of people whether they support membership of the European Union, and it is most likely they will also agree, often citing the ability to move freely, to live and study in other member states. But these two attitudes reflect an intractable tension in Irish political consciousness. Although it has been possible until recently to remain in denial about it, they are in conflict, and that conflict is only likely to intensify in the years ahead. It is the responsibility of republicans and socialists in Ireland to widen awareness of that fact and to campaign for resolving this tension in favour of the democratic self-government of the inhabitants of our island.
The EU’s undeservedly benign reputation
That project is made all the more difficult by the undeserved reputation the EU has accumulated in the context of Irish national politics. For decades the establishment presented EU membership on both sides of the British border in Ireland as a post-national catalyst for peace, making—it was argued—the question of Ireland's status and national identity redundant. In an ironic twist of history, Britain's departure from the EU then raised the prospect of a united Ireland, as political parties across the spectrum seized on reunification as a vehicle for the people in the north, a clear majority of whom voted against Brexit, to return to the EU's warm embrace. As disunity and political chaos descended on the "United Kingdom", the EU and its supporters in the south lost no time presenting themselves to publics north and south as a benevolent and responsible alternative. Dislodging these false impressions will take a lot of work.
But dislodge them we must. We must remind ourselves that membership of the EU, as it now exists, is increasingly incompatible with the democratic self-rule of the people of Ireland. The very meaning of the European Union—made explicitly clear in its foundational treaties—is that each of its member states, organised around democratic parliaments, has handed over some of their powers to a supranational entity, organised around the antidemocratic European Commission.
This has been done on a piecemeal basis, but that makes it no less a transfer of sovereignty. Many areas of policy and law which are traditionally decided by the government of a nation state, such as fiscal, monetary, and trade policy, have been ceded to the EU, and national governments no longer enjoy the freedom to govern independently within them, never mind to realise a fairer economic and social vision in line with the desires of the population.
It doesn't stop there. The EU is not static but a work in progress. The goal of "ever closer union" is enshrined in the EU treaties, meaning ever more integration, and ever less autonomy for member states. The most zealous of EU elites are committed to a federal model, pushing for reforms to diminish the ability of smaller member states to dissent or opt out, and reducing democratic input into how decisions are made at the EU level. Alongside this, mission creep ensures ever more areas of policy and law are affected by, or come to be decided by, the EU.
European defence policy and the erosion of Irish sovereignty
Nowhere is this more in evidence, and nowhere does it stand in greater contradiction with the idea of Irish self-rule, than in the expansion of the EU Common Foreign and Security Policy over the last decade. The ability of a state to conduct its own relations with other states, and to choose its alignment in world affairs, is central. It makes the difference between autonomy and vassalage. For this reason, for much of its history, the EU mostly played it safe on these fronts. For a long time, the slogan went, "the EU does not do geopolitics." As a result, it was possible for European publics to remain in denial about the implications for the ideal of national self-rule of building a supranational state. Reforms to EU law by the Lisbon Treaty, designed to lay the foundations for a big power grab in foreign and defence policy, were flown in under the radar, unreported in detail by the national press, and represented as technocratic, even apolitical by Irish elites, who continue to sneer in unison at "conspiracy theories" about EU militarisation and threats to Irish neutrality.
Once an affirmative vote had been extorted from the population in the second Lisbon Treaty referendum, under threats of dire economic consequences from EU leadership, the project was free to proceed. The seeds of today's flagship EU defence research investment programme, the European Defence Fund, were sown in 2013, when the European Commission Directorate for the Internal Market began regular meetings with the arms industry. It soon convened an advisory group of European defence industry CEOs—the so-called "Group of Personalities"—to design the policies by which ever greater tranches of the EU's budget would be given away to their own arms companies.
The European External Action Service—the EU's foreign office—was founded in 2010, led by a High Representative for Foreign Affairs, giving the EU its own diplomatic agency, parallel to member state diplomacy, and gathering together strategic planning, public diplomacy, intelligence gathering, and security functions. The EU began to comport itself as a power in and of itself in response to major international events over the ensuing decade. By the time the von der Leyen Commission was installed in 2019, it was proclaimed as the "first geopolitical Commission", which would "learn quickly to speak the language of power" and implement a "more muscular foreign policy", while building the institutions of a "European Defence Union", such as the "European Peace Facility" (an off-budget fund for sending weapons into conflict zones) and the "Rapid Deployment Capacity" (a standing EU military force under the command of a European military headquarters).
European contempt for Irish neutrality
We are now in a golden age of EU foreign policy hysteria. Human rights resolutions and bellicose pronouncements on Russia and China overshadow serious legislative work in the European Parliament, which has taken upon itself the right to decide the winner of elections in sovereign third countries. Mania over Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been mainstreamed into every policy area. EU defence cooperation is locked firmly within the framework of NATO, while ever increasing billions of taxpayers' euros are being directed into ramping up defence production capacity.
The world in which this EU exists is becoming more dangerous, more violent, and more unfair. War, climate change, and economic deprivation are displacing record millions of people, while politics in the developed world coarsens against migration. As the United States's global power wanes, it is seeking to maintain its primacy by ratcheting up a confrontation with what it views as its peer-competitor, the People's Republic of China. We are seeing the return of geopolitical blocs, and the reemergence of Cold War logic. A multipolar world is emerging, carrying the risk of even greater international instability, as medium powers jostle and resort to force to shore up their position. The United Nations and international law are weak and sidelined, undermined by decades of hypocrisy and double standards. The turn to a "might is right" approach to international affairs continues, as global military spending, at an all-time high, increases every year.
It is difficult to avoid the comparison between the present moment and the eve of the first world war, about which Connolly wrote so much. The EU is not neutral in any of it. It is affirmatively aligned with the United States, part of the so-called "Euro-Atlantic world." In the event of a new world war, the European Union will be a belligerent.
Much like the dawn of the first world war, Ireland is again ensconced in arrangements that preclude its neutrality in such an event. There is increasingly no place in the European Union for Irish neutrality. The level of incandescent contempt for neutrality that exists within mainstream European politics must be seen to be believed. Overwhelmingly, the attitude is that alignment is the price of membership: you are either with us or against us. Efforts are afoot to change the treaties, to remove individual member states' ability to block foreign policy decisions, meaning that even if—fancifully—the Dublin government were to be willing to dissent, it would be overruled and dragged along with the rest.
Contrary to the framing of the media in Ireland, there is therefore no "debate" on neutrality. Irish people's position in favour of preserving our neutrality remains steadfast and clear, in spite of efforts by hawkish pundits to evade this and instead present Irish opinion as "immature" and "muddled". This is an act of deliberate obfuscation. At the same time, in spite of Irish people's clarity on this question, Ireland is not, and cannot be, neutral in the European Union as it presently exists.
It is plain as day: boilerplate denials from the governing parties in the south are unserious, an insult to the intelligence of the public. As they prepare to reform the Triple Lock to allow deployment of troops on EU military missions without a UN mandate, it is very clear what they are doing. This cynicism is to be expected from the comprador parties and media, but more problematic is the lack of singular clarity on this issue from the various parties within the Irish left.
Opposition to militarism must be at the core of left-wing politics
There is almost universal agreement on the Irish left that militarisation must be opposed, peace supported, and neutrality defended. However, these commitments are sometimes treated as hobbyhorses, disconnected from the marquee debates of left-wing politics on the island. Meanwhile, there is a consistent failure in some parts of the left to make the direct link with the European Union, or to adequately represent what is happening at EU level. All too often, electoral parties on the Irish left reproduce the establishment framing of the EU, and leave the tension between EU membership and republican ideals unaddressed.
That isn't good enough. Opposition to EU militarisation and defence of neutrality are in fact near-existential questions for any idea of Ireland as an independent state. No debate on the possibility of a socialist republic can leave them unarticulated. Furthermore, they are now pivotal to the direction of European politics.
Were a Dublin government to robustly defend its sovereignty on these questions within the EU, refusing to abandon neutrality and pushing back against exceptionalism, this would be a welcome obstruction to the imperialists and warmongers. Taking up these issues is therefore an internationalist duty, as much as it is a republican one.
In the months and years ahead, as tensions ratchet up, government efforts to resolve the neutrality question in the EU's favour will only intensify. In anticipation, there must be militant opposition to those efforts. That must be accompanied by clarity within the Irish left on how central the question of neutrality and opposition to militarism has become to the project of democratic self-rule on our island.
The game must also be raised in terms of communication on these issues to the broader public. Over the two years, the spectacle of EU support for and participation in Israel's genocide in Gaza—setting a torch to its own credibility on questions of international law—has helped to break the illusion of the EU's benevolence for many people in Ireland. This raised consciousness must be developed. Lastly, the Irish left must begin organising now, domestically and internationally, in advance of a future referendum on EU treaty change in Ireland, the vote on which may affect the destinies of millions of people across the continent. When the EU comes knocking, we need to be ready.
Clare Daly has been active in socialist and left wing politics for 40 years. Twice Students' Union President in DCU, an airport shop steward, Anti- Water tax leader, Fingal County councillor, TD and most recently a Member of the European Parliament.