The Defence (Amendment) Bill 2025 was published just over a year ago, and still the likes of Martin, McEntee and Byrne are getting away with telling lies about what the bill actually means for Irish neutrality. There is virtually zero public discussion by either politicians or the media about the text of the bill. This means we are restricted to arguments around the politically manipulative talking points being put forward by the government and their mouthpieces in the media.
The Defence (Amendment) Bill 2025 repeals the Defence Amendment Act 1960 and the Defence Amendment Act 2006 – the two pieces of legislation that safeguard Ireland’s commitment to UN peacekeeping and the UN Charter with respect to the deployment of Irish defence forces abroad.
The three massive changes being proposed are around the numbers of defence forces allowed to be deployed, the safety mechanisms around that deployment, and what kind of missions they can be deployed on.
The current Triple Lock system is that for the deployment of any more than 12 defence forces to a peacekeeping mission abroad, it requires cabinet approval, a simple majority vote in the Dáil, and a UN mandate for the mission.
The proposed bill allows up to 100 defence forces to be deployed to illegal war-fighting missions led by the EU and NATO without even a vote on the Dáil floor. It is the end of Irish neutrality and the beginning of the end of Ireland’s legacy of UN peacekeeping.
That sounds dramatic, but that’s what the text of the bill says. This fact has been systematically ignored by the media and misrepresented and lied about by our political class.
Let’s look at the text.
Head of Bill No. 6 states that up to 50 defence forces can be deployed as part of an “international force” without a Dáil resolution or vote and no UN mandate. Another relief force of 50 can also be sent without a Dáil vote. This overlap – where 100 Irish defence forces are deployed as part of an ‘International Force’ – can persist for 30 days at a time. The bill is not clear as to whether this situation can be repeated with only a day’s interruption to the presence of both the initial and the relief deployments.
The bill next sets out the definition of “international force”:
‘“International Force” means an international force or body established, led, organised or supported by any of the following organisations:
(a) the United Nations,
(b) the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe,
(c) the European Union or any institution or body of the European Union,
(d) any other regional arrangement or body that operates in a manner consistent with the United Nations Charter and international law.’
For a start, there is no mention of peacekeeping here. As was repeatedly established in the pre-legislative scrutiny committee last year, this definition leaves it open to any kind of war-fighting mission.
Part (c) allows us to deploy on any EU-initiated mission – a battle group or EU Rapid Deployment Force intervention, for example. Part (d) opens the door to NATO interventions. They have the caveat about the UN Charter and international law, but there is nothing in the bill about how this would be rigorously adjudicated or applied, and nothing about a UN mandate. This is just meaningless window dressing.
The next section provides for what kind of activities this international force will be involved in. The “International Force will be mandated to operate for peacekeeping, conflict prevention and/or strengthening international security, in accordance with international law and consistent with the principles of the United Nations Charter.” Conflict prevention is contentious enough – it means a policing action with potential for war-fighting. Strengthening international security is just anything goes, really.
Read any NATO strategy document and you would come away thinking this is all they do. We are told the illegal, unprovoked war of aggression against Iran is in the interest of international security.
The final insult in this definition is the line “consistent with the principles of the United Nations Charter.” Even the first line of the treaty that established NATO on the 4th of April 1949 says this: “The Parties to this Treaty reaffirm their faith in the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments.”
While we swallow that, why don’t you tell us another one.
If this criterion were applied in good faith, it would rule out any collaboration with Britain, France, Germany, and the United States (in effect, the EU and NATO). All of them have been supplying weapons, logistics and diplomatic support for a genocide for over two years. The Irish government doesn’t even comply with its obligations under the UN Charter when it comes to its complicity in facilitating the transfer of arms and funds to the genocide in Gaza. Now we know, from recent reporting by Niall Seargent, the government was signing off on the export of tens of millions worth of Irish-made dual-use equipment that was likely used in the commission of genocide. This meaningless definition above is thrown in to soften the blow of departing from and undermining the UN Charter as a matter of official government policy.
What this whole thing is about is stepping out of the UN Charter and into the law of the jungle. Micheál Martin, Helen McEntee and Thomas Byrne are all explicit about this.
They want rid of the authority of the UN Security Council, as if the UNSC was not set up by the UN Charter. If you operate outside the bounds of the UN Security Council, you are operating outside the UN Charter – it’s that simple.
I want to address just a few government talking points, the ones they are still holding dear to.
Micheál Martin said on the Dáil floor on March 24, 2026:
“The reason we are doing the triple lock is the UN Security Council is paralysed. […] The opportunities for Irish peacekeepers, which is something we have been doing uninterrupted since 1958, is very much in the balance, but no one seems to care about that on the Opposition side in terms of our future role in peacekeeping.”
These arguments are an inversion of reality. It is abundantly clear the government is losing interest in UN peacekeeping missions. The Defence (Amendment) Bill is pivoting us towards ‘conflict prevention’ and ‘strengthening international security’ – vague terms for war-fighting missions. Meanwhile, the government has been reducing force numbers in UN missions and redirecting them to EU battlegroups. Irish defence forces ended their ten-year commitment to the UN Golan Heights mission in mid-2024 in order to do just that.
With regard to the deadlock at the UNSC, this talking point is nonsense. There is deadlock on some issues and there isn’t on most others. That’s the nature of the Security Council. This thing was set up so that nuclear powers would avoid stepping on each other’s toes. If permanent members use their veto, it is usually because they see an infringement on their perceived sphere of influence by other powers. The fact of the matter is that on peacekeeping there is broad agreement; every year all the peacekeeping missions get renewed by the Security Council. UNIFIL is ending in 2027, but that decision was the result of a broad consensus agreement, not a veto.
While we are on the subject, there are 11 active UN peacekeeping missions and we can deploy on any of them if we like; we only deploy to 3 of them.
The government says that no peacekeeping missions have been approved since 2014. This is not true. Whatever you think about the wisdom of them, in the past year the UNSC has approved peacekeeping missions in Haiti and Gaza. Where is the deadlock?
And then we have this rubbish about Ireland being held hostage by the UNSC veto.
Helen McEntee, 16 December 2025:
“It is not acceptable to the Government that any one of five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council have an essential veto on Ireland participating in Peacekeeping missions overseas.”
And Thomas Byrne, 17 February 2026:
“We are a neutral country. We send peacekeepers. We will send them in accordance with UN law, human rights law and the honourable tradition that we have, but we will not continue in a situation where individual countries can veto our decisions of the Dáil.”
This is ridiculous. First of all, there are no vetoes of peacekeeping missions. In 1999 China vetoed the continuation of a UN mission in Macedonia in a dispute regarding Taiwan. There are no other examples of a peacekeeping mission being vetoed. Secondly, the way the government and the media present this is as if it is the veto-holding powers singling out Ireland and saying only we are not allowed to partake in a mission. This is nonsense: if a mission is vetoed, there is no mission or an existing one is wound down and everyone goes home. This is UN law. And again, no one is vetoing anything regarding peacekeeping. Even in general, the UNSC agrees plenty – of the 284 resolutions brought before the UNSC between 2020 and 2024, 264 passed with no permanent member exercising a veto.
The government’s most breathtaking talking point is that ditching the Triple Lock and binning the UN mandate system is about regaining Irish sovereignty from the UN.
Article 6.1 of the Irish constitution says sovereignty derives from the people, who have the final word on all questions of national policy.[1] The Irish people exercised this right when we rejected the Nice Treaty in 2001. This rejection laid the ground for the Seville Declaration, which safeguards the Triple Lock and Irish neutrality in the context of the threat of increased EU militarism posed by the Nice Treaty.
The necessity for a UN mandate for deploying Irish defence forces abroad is not some onerous imposition from foreign powers like China, Russia or the US. It is a positive restriction on the government won by the Irish people expressing their sovereign right to decide a question of national policy.
Now the government wants to reverse this without going back to the people, in order to do exactly what we feared they would – what we won the restriction against: getting us embroiled in EU and NATO militarism and wars for the interests of genocidal Western elites.
If the government parties gave a damn about our neutrality and sovereignty, they would uphold international law and stop allowing Ireland’s airports, airspace and financial institutions to be used by the imperialist core to launch illegal wars and arm and fund a genocide. If they cared about democracy, there would be an open and honest debate around the Triple Lock and its impact on neutrality. But they know that over two-thirds of the public consistently support a positive neutrality for Ireland. So all we get are lies, disinformation, fearmongering and muddying the waters.
We have had this narrative from the government saying: “You elected us – do you not trust us to make the right decision when it comes to the deployment of the defence forces?” We had this idiocy in the pre-legislative scrutiny committee, where Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael representatives were running so far with this talking point that they were arguing that we were anti-democratic to be second-guessing their decision-making abilities. As if the limits of democracy are a vote and then whoever gets in should do whatever the hell they like unquestioned.
This attack on Irish neutrality and the Triple Lock is anti-democratic in the extreme. There is no mandate for it – none. It is FF and FG who don’t give a damn about democracy or the will of the people. Not only that, but they also shouldn’t be trusted. When it comes to foreign affairs, they have done nothing to shore up trust. Our Taoiseach and our minister for defence could not even condemn the intentional bombing of a children’s school in Minab in Iran. Helen McEntee said she “couldn’t say” whether the illegal, unprovoked US war of aggression against Iran was a contravention of international law. In her Dáil statement just days after the Minab massacre, she condemned Iran. And they think we are being anti-democratic to question their divine mandate and infinite wisdom.
Here is the maddest thing. These last few years, the US – our traditional trade partner and geostrategic ally – has openly been fuelling genocide and war like there is no tomorrow. NATO powers are all gearing up for war as some massive showdown between the US and China and the EU and Russia seems increasingly inevitable.
The government frets about instability but is actively trying to undo the only piece of legislation that protects us from getting embroiled in this mess. You look at the state of the world and the raw power and destruction being unleashed by our so-called like-minded partners, and you think: “If only there was some ready-made mechanism that protects us and stops us being pulled into a world war on the side of the genocidaires.” And yes! We have that – it’s called the Triple Lock – but now, at this perilous conjuncture in history, our great leaders have decided they have to destroy it.
We have been fighting to stop this from happening; meanwhile, they have been carrying on regardless with their military spending and military cooperation with NATO and the EU as if neutrality were already a thing of the past. Whether the Triple Lock goes or not, we still have a fight on our hands to stop these unrepentant warmongers.
