It’s not immediately clear what prompted the Irish government’s “Consultative Forum on International Security Policy” held in June. Polling consistently indicates that military neutrality is one of the country’s most popular policies, with polling sentiment in favor of joining NATO only around 15 percent. So, there’s hardly some organic swell in public opinion that explains the sudden interest in changing Ireland’s “Triple Lock” against overseas military deployments.

Even just three years ago, the center-right/Green ruling coalition issued a government program agreeing that this approach would remain unquestioned. Yet, while Irish media duly played down the idea that the Consultative Forum sought to erode the state’s historic neutral stance, the press in Europe reported things more straightforwardly: Ireland, we read, was questioning its “traditional policy of military neutrality.”

In fact, it has emerged not only that the Irish state has spent just over €1.19 million on a “liaison” office in Brussels over the last three years, but 130 members of the Irish defense forces are undertaking a NATO capability assessment. The fact that I was expelled from the forum’s first meeting in Cork — I had dared to raise a point of order about its format — indicates how serious an attempt at “national conversation” it was. The removal of an elected city councilor from a visiting roadshow on national geopolitics — at that, one chaired by a dame of the British Empire — did not seem to strike the organizers as potentially bad optics.