War mania has convulsed Europe since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. NATO is having something of a renaissance. EU member states have bought into the renewal of the alliance or plotted a kind of strategic autonomy, although some flirt with both approaches. According to the most recent estimates on the European Peace Facility (EPF), the EU’s extensive military support to Ukraine has totaled €5.6 billion.

Under relentless pressure from within and without, Finnish and Swedish neutrality came to an end last year as both states agreed to join NATO. Even nominally neutral Ireland has contributed €122 million under the EPF in “non-lethal support” for the Ukrainian military. War and its sibling, great-power rivalry, have thus unsettled century-old orthodoxies.

Against this backdrop, the Irish government recently closed the four-day Consultative Forum on International Security Policy, which was presented as a “public consultation process” after the government backed out of holding a more democratic Citizens’ Assembly. Chaired by the political scientist Louise Richardson, this forum followed months of concerted efforts by the Irish media and the government to “open a debate” on neutrality through a constant drip-feed of opinion pieces, supposedly revelatory polls, and new discoveries that allegedly undermine old shibboleths.