As an island and the European base for the vast majority of the Tech Titans, Ireland is extremely vulnerable to Russian sabotage. Just look at the underwater cables in the Baltic Sea that are currently suspected of having been cut by China last week. Moscow would be much more reluctant to sabotage Google, Microsoft, PayPal, Apple and eBay and create chaos on a grand scale if they were operating out of a NATO member state and not based on a small neutral island, wide open at the edge of the North Atlantic.

It is no secret that Ireland’s military is in poor shape. The Irish Naval Services suffers from depleted resources with a meagre eight ships in total. Meanwhile, the Irish Air Corps “has no defence capability of any significance”, according to a report in 2020. Even more worryingly, Dublin relies on the RAF’s Typhoon jets to intercept threats in Irish airspace, which makes a mockery of the country’s neutrality.

The Russian navy can – and does – brazenly enter the Irish exclusive economic zone. Could it have been a dummy run when one of their spy ships was escorted out of the Irish Sea on Nov. 15? According to a report in the Guardian, “its presence has raised fresh concerns about the security of the interconnector cables that run between Ireland and the UK carrying global internet traffic from huge datacentres operated by tech companies including Google and Microsoft, which have their EU headquarters sited in Ireland.”

There is a general election underway in Ireland at the moment. To outsiders, it must beggar belief that joining NATO is not even a topic on the political radar during these perilously dangerous times. The main political parties are afraid to broach the subject because there is strangely no appetite for it, with 61% of voters wanting to remain neutral,........

© The Moscow Times