Jennifer Carroll MacNeill: ‘We need to double defence spending to €3bn a year so we can defend ourselves’

by nitro1234561

44 comments

  1. Unfortunately I agree. There are no more excuses left. We have been gambling on peace for 40 years and we’ve been lucky. But every gambler runs out of luck and we rely on being able to defend submarine cables and we don’t want to ever have to ring up the UK in a war and ask for favours. They will ask for something in return that we don’t want to give.

  4. Yep fuck housing, healthcare, educations, roads, water, waste water & spend our money on pew pews instead.

  5. lol like it’s the question of how much you spend on it 😂

  6. Politician and Minister from the party that is most frugal/restricts spending calls for increased spending!

    Well I never! Must be an election incoming!

  7. Defend against who? If we sold everything, spent everything and conscripted everyone we still couldn’t defend against the likes of Russia, so what’s the point. Just pissing money away.

    Leave the wars to the Americans. Neutrality has served us well for 100 years.

  8. I would say more than double. The worlds danger is rising rapidly by the day, unfortunately

  10. I fully support more investment in defence, but this is a bit rich from FG after years of letting the Defence Forces wither.

  11. Spending that much on defence is like building a conservatory while your house is on fire. Pump the money into keeping the peace *within* the country rather than buying new toys for wargames.

  12. It’s just constant propaganda from the gun nuts. All the thousands of ‘time to join NATO’ articles, etc. Ireland must be strategically important geographically. First it will be NATO then some global economic coalition of doom saying we can’t buy Chinese cars. 

  13. Don’t know why people still argue against this. Improving our military doesn’t mean we need to join NATO or bomb the middle east, but we need to stop acting the gobshite and start paying for our own defence rather than sponging off the rest of Europe.

  14. The UK poses the biggest risk to us obviously. How much would it cost take to match their capabilities? Tens of Billions a year at least.

    Our best defense is remaining in the global economy and EU. All the sanctions that would come after an attack is our deferent.

  15. I would like for everyone to make note of how many bot accounts are on this particular thread. Lots of bot accounts want Ireland to build defences blatantly 🤣🤣🤣🤣

  17. Even if we spend every penny of the national budget on defence and borrow extra, there is absolutely no way we could defend ourselves against invasion by pretty much any country bigger than Liechtenstein. We would be totally at the mercy of the aggressor.

  18. Jennifer needs to drop this notion that we could ever “defend ourselves.

  19. Doesn’t have to be a war… how about hundreds, if not thousands of boats full of people, fleeing climate catastrophe, maybe 20 or 30 years from now. Or defending our off shore wind infrastructure from fucking pirates…Sounds like a mad max type plot, I know, but who knows what the future holds… investment is needed .

  20. We need to pay our defence forces a living wage. It’s a disgrace that they often have to apply for family income supplement to live. That’s why we’ve got ships docked with no one able to crew them.

  21. What size military do we need to be able to respond to someone like Russia? I don’t think doubling our spending will get us there.

  22. No matter how much we spend it won’t make a difference. We need to spend any extra money on infrastructure first before putting it into the pocket of already wealthy foreign shareholders. Lots of lobbying going on in the background and FFG will sell us out even further. The money will have to be taken from elsewhere.

  23. Why does this debate always fall into “who would want to invade Ireland?”. Ireland is massively dependent on the open economies of the western world and close links to MNCs. It is in Ireland’s long-term interest to be seen to be contributing to the protection of that structure lest people in other countries start challenging Ireland’s place in it (particularly when protectionism rears its head).

    If you don’t want to buy “guns” then get a proper radar set up and a fleet of maritime patrol aircraft (fully spec’ed P8s – not some half-arsed option).

  24. Isn’t it enough that we are a money laundering operation for multinational corporations, they want us to s start buying their death machines now?

  25. The fact that it’s Jennifer Goldman Sachs MacNeill coming out with this should tell you all you need to know.

    She’s probably been lobbied by Lockheed Martin into spending public money on weapons. Fine Gael scum.

  27. All the while there’s no guards on the street with feral kids trolling the cities thinking they are peaky fookin blinders

  28. I find a lot of Irish people’s “can’t someone else do it” attitude to Irish defence very strange.

    We should have an air force and navy of a similar size and capability as Denmark.

  29. Seems it should be obvious but for some reason a lot of people have bizarre and backwards views on the military here.

    Used to work in the tourism sector and literally one of the points that would consistently baffle them the most was hearing about the state of the Irish military.

  30. I always thought it would be great if, instead of having a larger professional military that costs a fortune, we had large-scale reservist training. Teach fighting age people in Ireland the skills needed to fight a guerilla war against an occupation. It would be great craic for young people to do on the weekends.

  32. And it should be primarily focused on the Navy.

    It’s bonkers that an island has a tiny navy and larger under utilised ground forces. 

  33. From a quick Google search this would have us spend about as much as denmark on defense

    So it would put in inline with our neighbors

    Not quite the dramatic as this subs seems to think

  34. Fine Gael Orange Lodge must be still pumped up after their parade

  35. We could quadruple the budget and we still couldn’t defend ourselves. Neutrality and intelligent diplomacy are our only rational defenses.

    FG is a joke.

  36. I see nothing wrong with that and it’s one of the very rare moments I fully agree with an FG member. A good, capable defence is essential and it works by deterring any attacks.

    Hell I’d say Ireland should have its own nukes too.

  38. With the way roi on investment wrks in this country what will 3 billion get us. A few guns and a tank?

  39. Please list the services you want to cut to pay for this Jennifer. All 1.8 billion €

  40. If we want to take the “neutral” country status seriously, we need to start spend about 15 billion / year now to catch up.

    Or we need to admit it’s not possible, join Nato and do it jointly.

  41. Agreed, Ireland needs to spend more on defence and I’m on the left politically and think Ireland needs a stronger military and Ireland needs to look into joining NATO as well. We can’t be neutral anymore!

  42. I would prefer if we were upping the budget because that would mean soldiers, sailirs etc. would get paid a proper wage.

  44. Defend ourselves from what? 3bn is pennies when it comes to proper defense.

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