French warship in Bantry Bay

35 comments
  1. Routine Patrols I’d assume.

    Nice of them to stop by since we don’t have a Navy right now to patrol for us. Fecking embarrassing to say the least.

  2. Since we don’t have much of navy and a airforce not fit for purpose, inviting EU navies to visit Irish ports via any Russian ships might be a good short term security measure. Also helps the local economy of those ports.

  3. I would assume France, the UK, the U.S. and NATO are keeping an eye on activity near cable routes.

    The vast majority of those transatlantic cable routes serve a lot of countries and are essential internet / telecommunications backbones. Many of them only pass near Ireland but actually make ultimate landfall elsewhere, mostly in SW England and NW France. We may be spurred into some of them. There are a few we tie into that route into the Nordic countries too.

    Even the cables that only make landfall in Ireland are effectively US interests anyway, as they’re connecting US multinationals serving data into Western Europe.

    A lot of the Russian activity isn’t in Irish waters either. So Ireland’s role in cable protection is fairly limited.

    As an island, very dependent on subsea cables and gas pipelines, we should be much more capable of patrolling our territorial waters and EEZ though.

    Considering how much income we have as a location for those multinationals, we should be spending a lot more on protecting ourselves.

    We’re also really being a bit ridiculous in not having active military radar. If we can only see planes with transponders switched on, we can even warn civilian aircraft of some rogue Russian aircraft wandering into flight paths and we now have a situation in Europe where that’s not really a remote risk anymore.

    The neutrality argument is fine, but we’re behaving like the hippy neighbour who thinks locking the hall door and not leaving the car keys in the ignition is bad karma. We should be capable of at least credibly protecting ourselves and we’re not.

  4. NATO ships seem to regularly dock in Cork City.

    Love the variety of ships you see along the quays.
    The city will lose some character when that’s no longer possible.

  5. To be honest we should probably just join one of the European states, France would be a good shout, we would be a good little overseas department, doing as we’re told.

  6. If we were neutral then we would also welcome Russian warships.

    Clearly people need to get their heads screwed on if they think we’re “neutral”.

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