The debate about the triple lock has been conducted as though neutrality and peacekeeping were the same thing. Neutrality means not joining military alliances or defence pacts – but this means little unless the State can defend its decision to stay neutral. Peacekeeping is something our soldiers do during other people’s wars, with their hands deliberately tied. The triple lock fused the two together.

My understanding of the interplay between all three comes from my time spent at a checkpoint in south Lebanon.

On September 29th, 1992, an armoured vehicle raced up the hill to an Irish checkpoint at Al Jurn that was receiving heavy fire from a Hizbullah team, with one soldier already wounded. The team turned its attention to the vehicle and engaged it with belt-fed machine gun fire, killing Corporal Peter Ward, aged 29. All that was left to the Irish afterwards was for senior officers to go down, liaise with the mukhtars, seek reassurance and calm everything down.

I arrived in July 1993, stationed at the same checkpoint. The training from the NCOs was very deliberate: no heroics. Two of my platoon carried gunshot scars from previous tours. There was no institutional capture of lessons learned in combat; what we knew, we learned from the NCOs.

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