Patrick Bresnihan and Rory Rowan
Introduction
The Neutrality Roadshow is an ongoing series of popular political education events focused on raising awareness about, and mobilising community resistance against, the government’s attempt to remove the so-called Triple Lock on the deployment of Irish Defence Force personnel overseas. Niamh Ní Bhriain, of the Transnational Institute, and former Dáil and European Parliament assistant Fionn Wallace established the Roadshow, working with local community groups to organise events. They were joined by 13 other speakers, including the current authors who contributed to events in Leitrim, Mayo, Belfast, and Drogheda. The first event was held in Kenmare, Co Kerry on 9th May and the Roadshow has so far made 23 stops right across the island. Only one of those events was in Dublin, in Swords on 7th June, but several more events in Dublin and beyond are currently being planned for August.
The Roadshow was born out of frustration with existing public debate on the issue of the Triple Lock and serious concern about the stakes of Ireland abandoning neutrality. But it was also motivated by a belief in the power of community organising and a recognition of the deep dissonance between popular attachments to Ireland’s tradition of neutrality and government attempts to align the state with imperial alliances and militarise Irish society.
Adults in the room?
Although polling shows that a consistently strong majority of the public support neutrality, their voices are dependably sidelined in Irish media, whilst the advocates of militarisation are relentlessly platformed. What we are currently witnessing – and being subjected to – is one of the most intensive and blatant state-led attempts to manufacture consent in living memory. The extent to which legacy media have echoed the government’s stance on this controversial issue and marginalised the majority opinion would be comical were the consequences not so grave.
Vocal support for militarisation appears to be the established norm amongst the editors and commentators in all major media outlets in Ireland. For the last two years, a coordinated chorus of senior government officials repeating NATO and EU talking points about the risks posed by Russia and China and loudly proclaiming the need for Ireland to rapidly increase military spending has been uncritically platformed across the legacy media landscape – a pattern that has intensified over recent months in keeping with the military spending bonanza announced by the EU’s ‘ReARM’, and ‘SAFE’ programmes. The almost complete alignment of Irish media debate with the position of the Irish government, and worse still those of the EU and NATO (of which Ireland is of course not a member), is an extremely worrying sign of the health of Irish democracy.
Much of the debate around the Triple Lock is purposefully clouded in a technocratic fog, designed to obscure the stakes of what the government is doing and to ensure that foreign policy remains the domain of qualified ‘experts’. Indeed, a small cohort of retired military personnel, former politicians, and academics who are critical of Irish neutrality and advocates of militarisation are constantly cycled across media platforms to establish the proper coordinates of right-thinking opinion, with the majority view only sparingly aired by representatives of opposition parties. Most egregious is the fact that one academic who frequently appears on national media as a scholarly expert is also the founding director of the Irish Defence and Security Association (IDSA), a lobby group representing the arms industry in Ireland.
These are the professed ‘adults in the room’, who are portrayed as experts qualified to speak on these complex issues, whilst those critical of the direction of government policy are excluded, patronised (see below), and smeared when necessary. See for example in the numerous Irish Times articles linking Catherine Connolly to Bashar al-Assad since she announced her candidacy for President. It is remarkable that despite the government parties’ almost unchallenged domination of political and media discussion of neutrality and militarisation, helped along by armchair generals in the academy, they remain so defensive when their policy positions meet with opposition.
This intolerance to criticism was evident during recent meetings of the Oireachtas Committee on Defence and National Security when Niamh Ní Bhriain and Karen Devine (also a Neutrality Roadshow speaker) were met with hostility and condescension by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael TDs. It was particularly noteworthy how threatened government party representatives were when Niamh quoted the words of people encountered during the Roadshow. Bringing the voices of the public into debates on foreign policy is not only unwelcome, but clearly appears to rattle the government parties who are seeking to delegitimise the presence of non-expert voices and the voice of the Irish public in matters that concern them.
One of the posters designed for the Roadshow by Cillian Redmond
For Roadshow contributors it was incredible to watch popular political education in action. Niamh Ní Bhriain typically opened sessions asking the audience who understood what the Triple Lock was. Although most had heard of it, few were confident they had a clear understanding of what it is and what it means. After two hours of input from speakers and open discussion with the audience, people left with a clear understanding of the basic facts of the case, and the context for and consequences of the government’s moves to remove the Triple Lock. Communities being ‘empowered’ is perhaps an overused trope, but in the case of the Roadshow this seems an apt description given that audiences were leaving informed, energised, and motivated to act.
Beyond the Pale
A key aspect of the Neutrality Roadshow was an attempt to reach communities right across the country, and crucially beyond the metropolitan myopia of the ‘Dublin Left’ whose concerns rarely extend beyond the capital’s suburbs. This meant taking the roadshow to regional cities and smaller rural towns right across the country, as well as crucially organising on an all-island basis with stops in Fermanagh, Derry, and Belfast.
What we found was a deep subterranean stream of anti-imperialist politics running through the country, nourished by an older generation of anti-war activists, a diverse Republican movement, radical environmental struggles, an anti-colonial language revival, and a Palestine solidarity movement that is active the length and breadth of the country. Ireland’s histories of colonialism, anti-imperial struggle, and international solidarity are marked and honoured across the country – from the Cuban flag and Bobby Sands pictures hung in a South Leitrim pub to the evocations of Frank Aiken’s work at the UN; and from the stories elders told of their time in Israeli prisons to the special paint needed to protect a Biden mural from repeated vandalism. These offer windows into an emancipatory counter-commonsense that percolates throughout Ireland beyond the imaginaries of Leinster House, Enterprise Ireland, and Bord Bia. It was striking to find anti-imperialist sentiment to be a powerful cultural norm, rooted in Irish identity and expressed in a deeply felt attachment to active neutrality, however marginal that norm is from the institutions of state.
Neutrality Roadshow, McGirl’s Pub, Ballinamore, Co Leitrim (May 2025); Courtesy Sive Bresnihan
Neutrality Roadshow, Connolly House, Belfast (June 2025)
What we found bore out what opinion polls have indicated for decades – that a very large majority of the Irish public are deeply attached to a vision of Ireland that is opposed to imperialism and war. We consistently found that active neutrality is not simply a matter of a popular policy stance but something that people strongly identify with, that touches on the core of what they understand as ‘Irishness’. Indeed, several audience members noted that neutrality was something they felt proud of, and that it was one area where they felt attached to the state.
The government’s ongoing attempts to remove the Triple Lock threaten to undermine this crucial connection between people and state. The consequences of betraying the public on this issue risks sowing alienation, suspicion, and resentment – sentiments already providing fertile soil for the growth of anti-democratic and far right forces across the country, particularly in disenfranchised rural and urban areas.
Mothers Against Imperialism
A striking feature of the Roadshow was the high percentage of women in the audience. In many cases the first question received after the speakers had finished came from women asking about conscription and whether their children will be sent to die in imperial wars. The discussion of neutrality was, for these women, not something abstract and far off but visceral and immediate – about home, family, community, and the fear of losing sons, daughters, partners, grandchildren for interests not our own. In some instances, these fears were expressed by those who had close family members in the Irish Defence Forces. These concerns betrayed a very different concept of protection and sense of security to the state’s talk of threats and defence.
On the one hand, the high proportion of women is an expression of the long history of women organising against war and imperialism in Ireland – from Constance Markievicz’ founding role in the Irish Neutrality League to the Republican women imprisoned in Armagh Prison and over two decades of women leading attempts to disrupt US military use of Shannon airport . On the other hand, the high proportion of women expressed the practical fears of those who are still disproportionately tasked with the work of caring for home, family, and community in our society.
The widespread concern that female audience members expressed about the consequences of the Irish state being able to send troops overseas to take part in imperial missions in conjunction with the EU and NATO emerge from the same sense of revulsion at colonialism, militarism, and empire that has motivated the influential Palestine solidarity group Mothers Against Genocide, whose members were present in Belfast and elsewhere. The experience of the Roadshow indicates that there is a powerful leading role for women in the movement to protect the Triple Lock and reclaim a more active form of Irish neutrality.
What’s next?
“What can we do?” was the most common question from Roadshow audiences. The responses were varied and context-specific but the Roadshow emphasised local community action based on existing organisational networks, such as local Palestine Solidarity organisations or anti-extractivist groups. The Roadshow was built on the foundational belief that these questions of national and international importance required a grassroots response, grounded in community, and could not be left to opposition parties alone. Their activities to defend neutrality within and beyond the Oireachtas were necessary but not sufficient, and a popular mass movement right across the country is needed for the government to realise the public’s powerful commitment to neutrality.
However, the Roadshow has already managed to contribute directly or indirectly to a number of initiatives that are seeing popular pressure build against the government during the summer months. Several councils have passed motions defending the Triple Lock, including Donegal, Cavan and Derry-Strabane in the North. The fact that county councils in the North are passing motions on legislation in the Republic points to the depth of anti-war feeling across the island, North and South. Similar motions in other councils have been rejected, but more councils plan to pass them over the coming months. The Irish Congress of Trade Unions held their AGM in Belfast two weeks ago and unions collectively passed a motion defending the Triple Lock and Irish neutrality. Union power may be important in developing a more robust response to government attempts to ram through anti-neutrality legislation and avoid democratic accountability.
A growing number of people are seeing beyond the government’s campaign of misinformation, dissemblance, and scaremongering, and are becoming aware of what is actually taking place and what is at stake. The Roadshow has, we believe, made an important contribution to this, alongside many other organisations such as The Transnational Institute, PANA, AFRI, Shannonwatch, Social Rights Ireland, Uplift, The Ditch, The Irish Neutrality League, and opposition parties, amongst others. The refusal of imperialist wars is a core facet of Irish identity for a large majority of the public, including for a great many who might not normally identify their politics in this way. This popular feeling can act as an extremely powerful bulwark against those determined to embed Ireland further into the structures of imperialism, militarism, colonialism, genocide, and environmental collapse, yet these sentiments need to be mobilised into action. Key to this are initiatives like the Roadshow – the often unspectacular work of going out to people, creating spaces for political education and deepening the movements needed to sustain meaningful social and political change.
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