So we we need a navy capable of engaging a Russian nuclear sub?
>It is estimated about three-quarters of all cables in the northern hemisphere pass through or near Irish waters, most off the southwest coast and some off the northwest coast.
>These cables carry 97% of global communications, including financial transactions, business operations, and everyday internet access.
Sounds like it would be in the interests of substantially better equipped and funded national navies to carry the protection.
Can’t help but feel that all these articles recently are a psyop to soften the populace up for NATO or eu foreign deployment stuff.
Just wait, they’ll announce next a finding program if cheap loans that we can avail of to arm ourselves like lens/lease or something
If its so important then NATO, US and the rest can pay us to provide this service with a healthy margin.
The irish taxpayer cannot afford and should not have to pay for this.
We have no such obligation.
If I put an airbed outside my neighbour’s garden, it’s not his responsibility to sit at the window on the lookout for miscreants puncturing it.
This seems like the latest in a long line of stories built into a narrative designed to force us into Nato against the will of the overwhelming majority of the people.
Denmark – a Nato member – spent €5bn on the Danish Defence last year, five times what we spent. Their navy has 3,600 people in it, spread over no fewer than 66 vessels. How did that work out for them when they were “obliged” to protect Nord Stream?
Yeah mind them yerselves, yanks
legally ireland dosent have an obligation tho
How far into the ocean are we “obliged” to protect?
Ireland is being so lazy and complacent when it comes to security. It’s going to take years, if not decades to implement a decent Navy that would make another country second guess attacking us, no matter how big they are.
At the moment Ireland is sitting back doing nothing, depending on other countries to protect us. If the shit does hit the fan those countries won’t be investing time and resources on protecting us. If we’re a liability our own allies will invade us and put their troops here. They aren’t going to risk Ireland being a launch pad for attack on the rest of Europe.
We’re really abusing our position, we’re just assuming everyone else will have to take care of us while we contribute nothing.
If a war against Europe went bad, we’d essentially be back to throwing sods of burning tuff at our occupiers. It’s like we don’t want to give our descendants a chance to defend themselves.
A military should be looked at the same way we look at insurance.
A lot of these cables seem to be owned by Microsoft, Google and Amazon
Let them protect them
Facebook should provide a navy to protect their cable
Article brought to you by the military industrial sales centre..
Fuck yer nuclear subs we got a dolphin outside.
Also our fisherman already scared off the ruskies .. like go and top that 😀
imagane having a functional fkn navy!!! Wed rule the waves like no brits ever before us.
This is like two junkies having a knife fight and someone saying I’m obliged to step in between them to stop the fight.
Ah sure it’ll be grand. Let someone else deal with the problem.
We can’t even build an underground metro line
Aye theyre gonna build the naval base in athlone
Obligation you say? Well now we’re definitely not doing it
We should get an aircraft carrier along with the supporting ship it requires and also a handful of nuclear powered submarines /s
I’d say the Russians are shitting themselves at the prospect
The rest of the world is obliged not to attack them.
Very much a problem that we should look into, without these the few major incentives for multinational companies to come here are completely wiped out. Internet > *insert any country here*
This craic that ireland is a neutral nation is nonsense unless we have the capacity to defend it. The brits are about two Tory prime ministers from invading and we need to be able to defend ourselves.
We really ought to have a better navy, but i’m dubious on the article saying it’s our problem to protect these pipelines and cables when other countries have much stronger militaries
This sub is like “The Brits or the Yanks would defend us shur” and “Sure what would we do against the Russians?”
**Please see:** War in Ukraine where UK and US didn’t help defend despite enormous strategic value of Ukraine.
**Also see:** A country that is currently battering the piss out of the Russians, called Ukraine.
Hybrid warfare is a thing lads, we’ve already been swiped at with it. Get with the times.
Why the all of a sudden push for the militarisation of Ireland 🤷🏻♂️
Good, we need one; we have like four boats. What about all the illegal fishing boats from China and the like, out in the Irish waters illegally while Irish fishermen get nothing and are not allowed to fish X or in X location of their own waters.
Ireland, defenders of the internet!
1. Ireland relies heavily on foreign direct investment.
If we cannot protect our own infrastructure then these companies will move to a country that can.
We have no Cyber Defence capability, we cannot cover our territorial waters/airspace or monitor who is coming into them.
2. Ireland will never join NATO.
We would have to increase our Defence spend to 2% of our GDP. That would be €12000000000 (12 billion) per annum.
To be a NATO country you need to be interoperable with other NATO countries. Nato Standardisation (STANAG) means new weapons, radio equipment, ships, planes etc. That could be North of €20 billion to do. The government want to up the spend to €1.5 billion but are doing it over a 6 year period (by 2028).
So the government are doing the absolute bare minimum to be seen to give shit about defence, without breaking the bank. The spending doesn’t make sense for a country looking to piggy back on NATO.
Long story short, I don’t get how people like to bathe in their ignorance on these issues?
It is in our territorial waters, we rely on it and if it goes down, we will be in the shit and our economy will be ruined?
Irish people love to sing rebel songs and be irish, yet we still rely on the UK to police our skies and patrol our waters. How is that acceptable?
Spending 3 billion on Defence would solve this problem, 5 billion would definitely solve this problem! We make €200 billion from foreign direct investment alone and every other company relies on the data and financial systems.
Think of it as an insurance policy. We’re protecting more than just cables in an ocean.
There’s an economic imperative in this too.
If there’s a major attack on cables, and we lose internet connectivity for months, and have been entirely unwilling to invest in protecting that infrastructure, we risk losing the FDI we are utterly dependent upon.
Were also not in NATO so can’t rely on a threat of an automatic retaliatory response if infrastructure were attacked.
If we aren’t going the NATO route we need a credible independent defence system and we don’t have that at all. It’s been allowed to drift along.
It’s also not just internet infrastructure, we depend on subsea gas pipes and electricity interconnection and are planning to be more dependent on it.
This isn’t some theoretical threat. The Russians were quite literally doing military drills in the area.
Also in an actual war situation you could have blockades and we don’t even have the ability to escort shipping.
I’m not even sure what our neutrality means anymore. You can’t really be neutral in the Ukrainian invasion situation, and we aren’t being neutral either.
Is it just a point blank refusal to spend any money defending ourselves? It’s just becoming a bit of an abstract concept that we seem to be unable to define.
We are also still assuming we’ve no strategic relevance and nobody would ever do us any harm, which may have been the case when we were a low population, economic backwater in the 1950-60s. It’s not the case anymore and hasn’t been for decades, largely due to FDI in pharma, tech and finance.
I’m also wondering about the safety of relying on the long, totally exposed interconnection to France as a source of power. We can’t realistically say that’s entirely safe anymore either. At the very least it should be planned so we are never in a situation where losing that would mean power shortages here. It should only be back up.
There’s an urgent need to be a lot more strategic about energy security here. We are risking being caught out very badly this winter. The lack of gas storage here is just grossly negligent and it was driven by unrealistic NIMBYism.
Reducing our CO2 emissions is urgent, but we can’t just stop go cold turkey on natural gas, unless you want to see the country literally collapse, and whether it’s coming from a ship or a pipeline, it’s having the same impact. A lot of our energy is coming from unethical and environmentally polluting sources, but for some reason we got fixated on blocking an LNG facility and ignored everything else…
We’re also having endless issues with getting off shore wind up and running and are tying ourselves in knots with conspiracy theory level stuff around electrical infrastructure.
Two massive offshore wind projects had their main international backers just pull out and walk away. That’s an utter indictment of our systems and we continue to tie ourselves in knots and more knots, behaving as if there’s no urgency at all.
We’re not having grown up discussions here at all. The lights will go off and then what? Who do we blame?
30 comments
Just pay the Cork fishermen to do it.
So we we need a navy capable of engaging a Russian nuclear sub?
>It is estimated about three-quarters of all cables in the northern hemisphere pass through or near Irish waters, most off the southwest coast and some off the northwest coast.
>These cables carry 97% of global communications, including financial transactions, business operations, and everyday internet access.
Sounds like it would be in the interests of substantially better equipped and funded national navies to carry the protection.
Can’t help but feel that all these articles recently are a psyop to soften the populace up for NATO or eu foreign deployment stuff.
Just wait, they’ll announce next a finding program if cheap loans that we can avail of to arm ourselves like lens/lease or something
If its so important then NATO, US and the rest can pay us to provide this service with a healthy margin.
The irish taxpayer cannot afford and should not have to pay for this.
We have no such obligation.
If I put an airbed outside my neighbour’s garden, it’s not his responsibility to sit at the window on the lookout for miscreants puncturing it.
This seems like the latest in a long line of stories built into a narrative designed to force us into Nato against the will of the overwhelming majority of the people.
Denmark – a Nato member – spent €5bn on the Danish Defence last year, five times what we spent. Their navy has 3,600 people in it, spread over no fewer than 66 vessels. How did that work out for them when they were “obliged” to protect Nord Stream?
Yeah mind them yerselves, yanks
legally ireland dosent have an obligation tho
How far into the ocean are we “obliged” to protect?
Ireland is being so lazy and complacent when it comes to security. It’s going to take years, if not decades to implement a decent Navy that would make another country second guess attacking us, no matter how big they are.
At the moment Ireland is sitting back doing nothing, depending on other countries to protect us. If the shit does hit the fan those countries won’t be investing time and resources on protecting us. If we’re a liability our own allies will invade us and put their troops here. They aren’t going to risk Ireland being a launch pad for attack on the rest of Europe.
We’re really abusing our position, we’re just assuming everyone else will have to take care of us while we contribute nothing.
If a war against Europe went bad, we’d essentially be back to throwing sods of burning tuff at our occupiers. It’s like we don’t want to give our descendants a chance to defend themselves.
A military should be looked at the same way we look at insurance.
A lot of these cables seem to be owned by Microsoft, Google and Amazon
Let them protect them
Facebook should provide a navy to protect their cable
Article brought to you by the military industrial sales centre..
Fuck yer nuclear subs we got a dolphin outside.
Also our fisherman already scared off the ruskies .. like go and top that 😀
imagane having a functional fkn navy!!! Wed rule the waves like no brits ever before us.
This is like two junkies having a knife fight and someone saying I’m obliged to step in between them to stop the fight.
Ah sure it’ll be grand. Let someone else deal with the problem.
We can’t even build an underground metro line
Aye theyre gonna build the naval base in athlone
Obligation you say? Well now we’re definitely not doing it
We should get an aircraft carrier along with the supporting ship it requires and also a handful of nuclear powered submarines /s
I’d say the Russians are shitting themselves at the prospect
The rest of the world is obliged not to attack them.
Very much a problem that we should look into, without these the few major incentives for multinational companies to come here are completely wiped out. Internet > *insert any country here*
This craic that ireland is a neutral nation is nonsense unless we have the capacity to defend it. The brits are about two Tory prime ministers from invading and we need to be able to defend ourselves.
We really ought to have a better navy, but i’m dubious on the article saying it’s our problem to protect these pipelines and cables when other countries have much stronger militaries
This sub is like “The Brits or the Yanks would defend us shur” and “Sure what would we do against the Russians?”
**Please see:** War in Ukraine where UK and US didn’t help defend despite enormous strategic value of Ukraine.
**Also see:** A country that is currently battering the piss out of the Russians, called Ukraine.
Hybrid warfare is a thing lads, we’ve already been swiped at with it. Get with the times.
Why the all of a sudden push for the militarisation of Ireland 🤷🏻♂️
Good, we need one; we have like four boats. What about all the illegal fishing boats from China and the like, out in the Irish waters illegally while Irish fishermen get nothing and are not allowed to fish X or in X location of their own waters.
Ireland, defenders of the internet!
1. Ireland relies heavily on foreign direct investment.
If we cannot protect our own infrastructure then these companies will move to a country that can.
We have no Cyber Defence capability, we cannot cover our territorial waters/airspace or monitor who is coming into them.
2. Ireland will never join NATO.
We would have to increase our Defence spend to 2% of our GDP. That would be €12000000000 (12 billion) per annum.
To be a NATO country you need to be interoperable with other NATO countries. Nato Standardisation (STANAG) means new weapons, radio equipment, ships, planes etc. That could be North of €20 billion to do. The government want to up the spend to €1.5 billion but are doing it over a 6 year period (by 2028).
So the government are doing the absolute bare minimum to be seen to give shit about defence, without breaking the bank. The spending doesn’t make sense for a country looking to piggy back on NATO.
Long story short, I don’t get how people like to bathe in their ignorance on these issues?
It is in our territorial waters, we rely on it and if it goes down, we will be in the shit and our economy will be ruined?
Irish people love to sing rebel songs and be irish, yet we still rely on the UK to police our skies and patrol our waters. How is that acceptable?
Spending 3 billion on Defence would solve this problem, 5 billion would definitely solve this problem! We make €200 billion from foreign direct investment alone and every other company relies on the data and financial systems.
Think of it as an insurance policy. We’re protecting more than just cables in an ocean.
There’s an economic imperative in this too.
If there’s a major attack on cables, and we lose internet connectivity for months, and have been entirely unwilling to invest in protecting that infrastructure, we risk losing the FDI we are utterly dependent upon.
Were also not in NATO so can’t rely on a threat of an automatic retaliatory response if infrastructure were attacked.
If we aren’t going the NATO route we need a credible independent defence system and we don’t have that at all. It’s been allowed to drift along.
It’s also not just internet infrastructure, we depend on subsea gas pipes and electricity interconnection and are planning to be more dependent on it.
This isn’t some theoretical threat. The Russians were quite literally doing military drills in the area.
Also in an actual war situation you could have blockades and we don’t even have the ability to escort shipping.
I’m not even sure what our neutrality means anymore. You can’t really be neutral in the Ukrainian invasion situation, and we aren’t being neutral either.
Is it just a point blank refusal to spend any money defending ourselves? It’s just becoming a bit of an abstract concept that we seem to be unable to define.
We are also still assuming we’ve no strategic relevance and nobody would ever do us any harm, which may have been the case when we were a low population, economic backwater in the 1950-60s. It’s not the case anymore and hasn’t been for decades, largely due to FDI in pharma, tech and finance.
I’m also wondering about the safety of relying on the long, totally exposed interconnection to France as a source of power. We can’t realistically say that’s entirely safe anymore either. At the very least it should be planned so we are never in a situation where losing that would mean power shortages here. It should only be back up.
There’s an urgent need to be a lot more strategic about energy security here. We are risking being caught out very badly this winter. The lack of gas storage here is just grossly negligent and it was driven by unrealistic NIMBYism.
Reducing our CO2 emissions is urgent, but we can’t just stop go cold turkey on natural gas, unless you want to see the country literally collapse, and whether it’s coming from a ship or a pipeline, it’s having the same impact. A lot of our energy is coming from unethical and environmentally polluting sources, but for some reason we got fixated on blocking an LNG facility and ignored everything else…
We’re also having endless issues with getting off shore wind up and running and are tying ourselves in knots with conspiracy theory level stuff around electrical infrastructure.
Two massive offshore wind projects had their main international backers just pull out and walk away. That’s an utter indictment of our systems and we continue to tie ourselves in knots and more knots, behaving as if there’s no urgency at all.
We’re not having grown up discussions here at all. The lights will go off and then what? Who do we blame?