RTÉ & Irish Times platform British warmonger against Irish Unity

As a strongly pro-neutrality president of Ireland was about to be elected last week a British warmonger addressed a unionist meeting in Westminster and said Irish unity would pose a threat to Britain from Russia.

Former British Navy rear admiral and senior NATO commander Chris Parry was speaking at a briefing organised by the unionist think tank, the Together UK Foundation. DUP MP Sammy Wilson and former MP ‘Lord’ Nigel Dodds attended. Parry said NATO should hold naval exercises in Irish-controlled waters, whether the Irish government  agreed or not.

“Would I want Ireland on our side in a war with Russia? Yes. There is an immense amount of talent in the Republic that is not being exploited,” stated Parry. He described the militarily neutral 26 Counties as “strategically irrelevant as long as the UK maintains Northern Ireland”, giving the United Kingdom a base to police North Sea waters ond approach routes to Scotland. “With a united Ireland, there is no guarantee we could deploy our ballistic missiles”, he added.

This address to a unionist audience in Westminster was extensively and uncritically covered in The Irish Times on 23 October, the day before polling in the presidential election.

• Claire Byrne

The next day, polling day, Parry was given a soft soap interview by Claire Byrne on RTÉ radio. He was allowed to say without challenge that his view was ‘not political’, even though he had addressed an avowedly political meeting. He was not asked, let alone challenged, about his call for NATO exercises in Irish waters without Irish government consent.

Parry also said that the Irish are “good fighters” while Claire Byrne laughed along. The ‘fighting Irish’ racist stereotype has long been used by the British establishment in their attempts to recruit Irish people for their wars. Parry last month described the British government’s recognition of the Palestinian state as akin to the US recognising Nazi Germany and said Israel was trying to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza. He said in an interview on Times Radio that no country, including Britain “could have conducted this war with less casualties on the other side”!

Here we had RTÉ and The Irish Times uncritically platforming a NATO warmonger warning against Irish Unity and pushing for Irish membership of NATO. It chimes with the Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael government’s plan to abolish the ‘triple lock’ which protects Irish neutrality. However, Mícheál Martin and co will not do this so easily now given the huge mandate received by the strongly pro-neutrality Catherine Connolly and the movement which backed her.