The arrival of Trump 2.0 in the White House has disrupted the foreign and defence policies of all states and shattered existing paradigms of world order. Political leaders across the globe are having to assess how they respond to this more unpredictable and precarious world. For Ireland, the task is all the more difficult because the country’s core geopolitical anchors – the US and EU – are under stress.
Donald Trump’s Maga policy challenges Ireland’s political economy, which relies on extensive US investment. Although cordial, taoiseach Micheál Martin’s recent meeting with Trump in the Oval Office provided the US president with the opportunity to level the charge that Ireland “took” the US’s pharmaceutical companies, and that the US now wants them back. Moreover, Ireland is not insulated from the tensions surrounding the emerging trade war between the US and the EU. At the same Oval Office meeting, the taoiseach had to sit and listen to a tirade against Europe, in which Trump claimed the EU was “set up in order to take advantage of the United States”.
Ireland’s European anchor is under strain because of the shift in the transatlantic relationship and the growing urgency of the EU’s focus on its defence and security. As one of the three remaining EU member states that are neutral, Ireland is out of sync with most of Europe. Austria, the other comparable neutral left (Finland and Sweden joined Nato in 2023 and 2024 respectively), spends far more on defence than Ireland, even though it does not need a navy.
Ireland will hold the presidency of the EU council of ministers during the second half of 2026 but it is an outlier because of its low spend on national security. In 2024, Ireland’s defence budget was €1.29bn or 0.24% of its GDP, the lowest in Europe. The Irish army and navy are way below strength because of difficulties in recruitment and retention. Decades of political neglect of security have left Ireland defenceless.
Yet Ireland’s benign geographical location, despite cyber-threats and threats to the undersea cables that run through Irish waters, crowds out rational debate on defence and the deployment of Irish forces overseas. While the EU agenda is focused on rearming Europe and providing support to Ukraine, the Irish parliament is debating something called the “triple lock”.
This was part of a package of legal measures introduced in 2001 to reassure voters about neutrality after they voted to reject the EU’s Nice treaty. It means that the deployment overseas of more than 12 Irish troops for peacekeeping requires the approval of the government, the Dáil, and the UN. This gives the permanent members of the security council a veto over the deployment of Irish forces.
Following a wide-ranging public consultation on its foreign and security policy in 2023, the government signalled that it intended to reform the triple lock. The current coalition headed by Martin is pressing ahead with legislation to remove the need for UN authorisation. This has met vociferous opposition in parliament from all parties on the left, including Sinn Féin. Their argument is that the mechanism is fundamental to Irish neutrality and that its removal could be a precursor to Nato membership or involvement in a European army. The government has a solid parliamentary majority, so the triple lock will go, but not without a fight.
Abolishing the triple lock will not come close to removing the multiple challenges Ireland faces in the current international security climate. In fact, the Irish debate appears to be taking place on another planet from the rest of Europe, given the speed at which events are evolving.
Ireland is playing catchup and relentless assertions that the country is neutral offer no protection from strategic threats. After attending the 2025 Munich security conference, where they heard US vice-president JD Vance’s extraordinary attack on liberal democracy in Europe, Martin and the deputy prime minister Simon Harris are aware that maintaining the status quo will not suffice.
The government is serious about addressing the weakness of the national defence capability with more spending. It set up an independent commission to conduct a year-long review of the defence forces. The commission reported in February 2022, just before the epoch-changing Russian invasion of Ukraine. The report sketched three levels of ambition, the first being the current capability, or “business as usual”; the most ambitious being “level-three conventional” capability, which would require a significant upgrade to annual spending of €3bn.
In 2023, the government committed to a middle path, level-two enhanced capability by 2028, gradually increasing defence spending by 50% to €1.5bn. But in government circles there is now an awareness that this is not enough. The capital allocation to the defence sector is likely to be increased in July. But, remarkably, this is being done without the national security strategy that was supposed to have been published in 2021.
With its presidency of the council of the EU in prospect, Ireland finds itself embarrassingly out of tune with the majority of EU member states, as defence and security become central to the European agenda and vast resources go into rearming Europe. Ireland needs to deepen its engagement with the EU’s defence initiatives and cooperate more closely with Nato if it is to enhance its defence capability. But domestic opposition could limit or prevent both.
If there is an enduring transatlantic rupture, stand-alone European security structures will be created and Ireland will have to decide on its place, if any, in these structures. Given the EU solidarity Ireland received during Brexit negotiations, expectations of reciprocal solidarity will be hard to meet if Ireland remains on the sidelines.
If a European common defence is at some future date agreed, Ireland’s participation will be put to the people in a referendum. Public opinion today would reject this, but one cannot predict what will happen given the fluidity of geopolitics.
For now, Ireland will retain its formal status as a neutral state, but it may struggle to maintain its significance in the EU.
Brigid Laffan is an Irish political scientist and emeritus professor at the European University Institute in Florence
