Ireland must remove its so-called triple lock mechanism so it can send Irish troops on UN peacekeeping missions and express its sovereignty in a manner envisaged by Michael Collins. The comments were made by Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill at the Béal na Bláth commemoration in west Cork.
Ms Carroll MacNeill said it was Collins who laid the foundation for the constitutional architecture of the Irish State as well as the institutions that protect that constitutional democracy – the Defence Forces, An Garda Síochána and the beginnings of the judicial system.
She said she fully agreed with her friend and former Fine Gael leader, Michael Noonan, when he declared at the 2001 Béal na Bláth Commemoration that Collins was “the man who, more than anybody else, can rightly be described as the father of Irish democracy”.
Collins established the Irish Defence Forces, while he also had a vision of Ireland and its place in the world as a sovereign state. In 2006, former Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny spoke of Irish pride in its defence forces embarking on global peacekeeping missions with the UN.
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“But the reality is we have not been able to sanction a new peacekeeping mission since 2014 because we, somehow in 2001, decided to hand the decision making about where we send our sovereign troops to an international body, the UN Security Council,” Ms Carroll MacNeill said at the annual Michael Collins commemoration on Sunday.
“[It is] a body that includes both the forces ejected by Michael Collins himself and that includes countries shown to be nefarious imperialist forces. We have taken away our own sovereignty, as though we are incapable of deciding where our peacekeepers should be.”
Collins, who was killed during the Civil War in an ambush by anti-Treaty IRA men at Béal na Bláth on August 22nd, 1922, once said: “I think in long strides.”
Ireland needs to take a similar long-term view when it comes to foreign policy, where it is committed to the rule of law, Ms Carroll MacNeill said.
She added: “We absolutely condemn the utterly illegal and genocidal actions of Russia and Israel and yet we handed our sovereign decision making to some of them because we cannot trust ourselves? This is not the thing of a sovereign people.
“There have been no new peacekeeping missions approved by the UN Security Council since 2014, the year Russia first invaded Ukraine. We cannot be held by others. We must remove the triple lock and take charge of our own affairs and be held to account for our own decisions – the essence of constitutional democracy.”
UN Security Council approval is one aspect of the triple lock consent mechanism governing overseas deployment of Irish troops, which also requires a Dáil vote and Government decision.
Ms Carroll MacNeill said she shared Collins’s view regarding the role of politics in building a sovereign state. However, politics in Ireland today was facing new challenges, not just in terms of policy, but also in terms of how politics is conducted.
“We must acknowledge the pressures and dangers faced by those in public life,” she said. “Collins was killed here. Kevin O’Higgins was killed in my own constituency. The legacy of political violence is real. And while we are far from that today, we must not be complacent.”
Ms Carroll MacNeill recalled that her former Dáil colleague Heather Humphreys spoke about the 1974 murder of Senator Billy Fox when she gave the oration at Béal na Bláth in 2021. It was a reminder, she said, that political violence was not “just a distant memory, but part of our lived history”.
She pointed to events in the UK, the USA and Europe. While the threat of violence is remote, she said, the threat to the functionality and purity of democracy is present every day through new technologies that allows disinformation to be amplified.
“What’s more troubling is the influence of foreign actors who deliberately agitate against democratic institutions, against science and against the very idea of democratic governance. This is not just noise. It’s a threat to the functioning of democracy.”
She cited the recent example of former chief medical officer Dr Tony Holohan opting not to run for president because of the inevitable impact of social media abuse on his family, which was a worrying development in any democracy.
“Whatever your political allegiance, that kind of self-exclusion is a loss for public life. And I do say this with full awareness of where we stand today, in this hallowed valley, commemorating a man who was shot and killed for his political vision,” she said.
“Cribbing about internet disinformation feels almost unfit to utter here, but it is part of the modern dissident threat and it has implications. It erodes public trust, it erodes truth and erodes the willingness to serve and that is damaging to our sovereign democracy.”
