How much should Ireland spend on defence?
One way to judge defence spending is to compare it with neighbours. By this yardstick, Ireland is an extraordinary outlier, spending €1.49 billion in 2026 or 0.3 per cent of GDP – the lowest in the EU, with a current average of 2.4 per cent.
When some of the distortions created by Ireland’s multinational sector are removed, the figure given by Minister for Defence Helen McEntee to the Dáil in January for 2024 was less than 0.4 per cent of GNI*. The conclusion is surely obvious: Ireland is a freeloader.
But the comparison tells us less than it first appears to. Spending as a GDP target is discussed so often because the heavy spenders are largely members of Nato, an alliance constructed around collective capabilities made possible because of mutual obligations. Its spending targets are intended to make sure that members contribute to that effort – hence they measure contribution. But they do not, by themselves, measure capability.
For Ireland, a country outside of a military alliance, a GDP target is nearly meaningless. The point of a defence budget is not to spend the most, but to buy the capabilities you need. Thus one country can have enormous defence expenditure with few capabilities to show for it; while another can spend very little and find themselves adequately protected. The only way to know if a national budget is enough is by examining it against that country’s defence strategy.
And Ireland’s real problem is that we have never had one. We have frameworks and policies and policy reviews. But we do not have a whole-of-government National Security Strategy.
The most recent White Paper on Defence is now more than a decade old, though it has since been updated, with a review in 2024 and an implementation plan and strategy statement in 2026. The Commission on the Defence Forces wrote a 224-page report in 2022, but its 69 main recommendations do not equate to a defence strategy. And the National Security Strategy, started in 2019, remains unpublished six years later. None of it amounts to the kind of comprehensive, contemporary strategy that is needed.
We therefore have a record €1.49 billion defence allocation this year and a €1.7 billion five-year capital programme, but no overarching strategy that sets out the threats Ireland faces, the capabilities required to address them, and how those capabilities should be prioritised.
Without a strategy, nobody – including the Ministers for Defence and Finance – can say whether we are spending too little or too much. And the people asking us to increase the budget, alongside those declaring that every euro being spent is a betrayal of our neutrality, are arguing about a number without knowing what this number should supposedly do.
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Ireland’s strategic gap in defence is most serious in procurement, the most important part of any defence system. We are now making the largest military purchases in the history of the State without an acquisition strategy of any kind. This is profoundly concerning – there is no understanding of how those purchases should be prioritised, priced, sequenced and sustained over their multi-decade lifetimes. Instead, procurement appears to be the outcome of off-hand decision-making as a security crisis appears; a whack-a-mole approach not seen in other countries.
Ireland is acquiring five deployable long-range radar systems as part of a government-to-government agreement with France for a system expected to cost €500 million. The planned armoured-vehicle fleet is being pursued through the same route and, according to reports, is expected to cost roughly €500 million to €600 million. However, neither programme was competitively tendered, meaning accountability for how the State established value for money, and why these capabilities were prioritised, is vital.
That prioritisation is already being felt elsewhere. The Department of Defence has been told to find €12 million in savings over the next year. Meanwhile, there is currently no funding to advance the programme to fit naval vessels with air-search radar, while the replacement of naval guns and the acquisition of new “super medium” helicopters have also been delayed.
The result is defence spending that could only emerge in the absence of a clear strategy: large-item programmes are green-lit while other capabilities are deferred, without a transparent rationale of why, or to what end. An increased defence budget therefore tells us very little about whether Ireland is actually becoming better defended, or what we are defending ourselves against.
While eastern Europe worries about defence in the traditional sense of territorial invasion with tanks, western Europe’s issues are primarily related to security – cyberattacks, espionage, sabotage of critical infrastructure. Ireland learned this the hard way when a criminal organisation prompted a shutdown of the HSE’s computer systems in 2021.
But the strategic environment is changing. Ireland is home to a disproportionate share of Europe’s digital infrastructure with transatlantic cables and data centres. Today, we are hosting the presidency of the Council of the EU – the bloc bankrolling much of Ukraine’s war effort. Ireland is becoming a place of interest to hostile actors.
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However, this is a second-order threat; Ireland has no natural enemies, and adversarial interest exists purely because of our strategic assets and geography. A threat to Ireland is by way of a threat to Europe – but the public mapping from threat, to vulnerability, to required capability, to procurement has never been attempted.
Ireland’s defence needs are fast becoming too complex for binary thinking, although it is nearly always discussed as such – the real choices are more granular. We can remain militarily neutral while developing substantially greater capacity for self-protection through surveillance, maritime protection and critical infrastructure. We can support Europe’s need to rearm without becoming a militarised industrial economy. What matters is that Ireland makes these choices consciously, and that they form a coherent strategy rather than a collection of contradictory positions.
How much should Ireland spend on defence? Until we establish why we need to spend anything, it’s not possible to know.
Sinéad O’Sullivan is an Irish Times columnist and business economist. She is the founder of Security Ireland, an independent policy institute providing evidence-based analysis on Ireland’s security and defence architecture which has no external funding or industry affiliations
