8

Beyond Hegemonies: Ireland in the EU and on the World Stage since 1994

During the mid-1990s, the creation of new regional trading blocs and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) was essentially an end result of joint work by the UN and the World Bank dating back to 1960. Individual Europeans continued to play a significant diplomatic role within all interrelated UN and World Bank initiatives. As Peter Sutherland discovered, however, the United States was hesitant about abiding by the new ‘rules-based’ economic system that it had largely inspired if it potentially had to curtail its own freedom of action, a development that was equated with a theoretical loss of sovereignty.¹ In addition, London economists expected that America would have little sympathy for the idea of a new European currency that could potentially compete with the US dollar on foreign exchange markets.² Nevertheless, the new European Union (EU) was welcomed because it had the diplomatic potential to deal effectively with the Middle Eastern, African and former Soviet blocs through a practical ‘good neighbour’ policy. Like all EU member states, Ireland signed up to the essentially French-inspired (but often Spanish-led) ‘Barcelona Process’ that envisioned the development of a ‘Union for the Mediterranean’ that would promote free trade between the EU and the Arab League’s ‘Council of Arab Economic Unity’, which had existed since the 1960s with a headquarters in Cairo, Egypt. Combined with €6 billion in developmental aid to the Third World and over a billion euros a year in development aid to the Middle East, this action by the EU was designed to encourage a new spirit of political cooperation between Israel and its Arab neighbours, while also laying a basis for the future African Union project.³ Although it was not widely perceived in such terms in Ireland, the Northern Ireland peace process was often considered internationally to be a comparable development in terms of the operations of the global economy and the resulting cessation of the Cold War. After a ‘last remaining NATO military installation in Northern Ireland’ closed during 1990, European and American support for the Ulster-focused ‘International Fund for Ireland’ had the potential to undo some of the legacies of the Northern Troubles, which had been caused and perpetuated not least by a prioritisation of military solutions to political problems. The prospect of greater free movement of labour within the EU also had the potential to undo the ‘cold war’ in relations between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.⁴

On a political level, the reunification of Germany initially bred much uncertainty. This was appeased in the wake of Haughey’s 1990 European Council meetings in Dublin, when German chancellor Helmut Kohl emphasised that a common foreign and security policy for Europe must rest upon a purely economic, rather than military, basis. This reflected the degree to which NATO remained a basis whereby America could provide Europe with a defence capability without necessarily either imposing strategic directives or creating a basis for the rise of European militarism.⁵ To many, however, Europe’s relative difficulty in solving the crisis in the former Yugoslavia substantiated the longstanding belief held by British international relations theorists: any claim that militarism was not inherently the key factor in international relations was both naïve and unrealistic.⁶ By contrast, just prior to serving a rare term on the UN Security Council (2001), Ireland would term Europe’s new approach to international affairs as a non-hegemonic one that was marking the birth of a new ‘era of enlightened multilateralism’, characterised by an astute anti-militarism.⁷ In this sense, Ireland’s intended identity in the post-1994 international order was to support the idea of rules-based international order that would operate beyond the great powers’ perpetual preoccupation with the notion of rising and falling hegemonies.

A growing trend in European cultural diplomacy was to emphasise that, in the past, ‘national, ideological, religious and ethnic stereotypes’, as well as a fear of migrants, had been propagated for purely ulterior motives by totalitarian regimes who saw cultural diplomacy as ‘an instrument of psychological warfare—for them foreign policy was warfare’ as well as a bid for ‘cultural predominance’. As ‘cultural diplomacy is part and parcel of a nation’s foreign policy’, it was argued that there was a need for ‘a joint European approach based on agreed principles’, such as the creation of ‘a European Cultural Charter for the promotion and protection of fundamental cultural rights of European citizens’. As was the case with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, it was argued that such a cultural charter should ‘define fundamental cultural rights as individual rights’.⁸ Closer European cooperation at the UN encouraged the development of new human rights initiatives, as well as the creation of a Human Rights Unit within the Irish department of foreign affairs. This trend also provided a basis for extensive eastern European involvement, on a supposedly equal basis, in a new ‘Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe’ (OSCE), which was chaired by neutral Austria, included Irish political representation and was sustained in part by German economic support for the redevelopment of many central and eastern European cities.⁹ The political impact that this trend had upon Ireland was to stimulate the growth of an almost aggressive individualism within the Irish media and a clear political prioritisation by Irish, as much as central European, governments of urban over rural development.¹⁰ Meanwhile, a perceived positive impact upon Irish educational and social policies made by European legislation saw an almost immediate cessation of the traditional euroscepticism of the Irish Labour Party.¹¹ This helped to make the 1990s a rather transitional decade in Irish life. A growth in Spanish–Irish relations, reflected by the launch of Estudios Irlandeses by the University of Salamanca in 1994, also led to a deepening of Irish relations with Latin America.¹²

Significant efforts were made to expand Ireland’s international trading links as soon as EU participation in the latest GATT agreements became operational. Efforts to expand the export operations of Irish food or drink companies to countries like Japan, although ultimately fairly successfully, initially faltered because of the priorities of the foreign exchange markets of what were termed the ‘Asian Tiger’ economies, namely the former British colonies of Singapore and Hong Kong, and the American-influenced countries of South Korea and Taiwan.¹³ As a result, Ireland’s ‘Asia strategy’ thereafter focused on promoting the exports of American firms within Ireland in the same technological and pharmaceutical industries that had become the basis of a rapid growth in the Chinese economy.¹⁴ This led many to speak of the existence of a new ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy.¹⁵ Some interpreted this development as evidence that Ireland’s role in the Atlantic economy had shifted from being a satellite economy of Britain to being a satellite economy of the United States,¹⁶ although the flaw in this perspective was that it did not take into account how Ireland’s access to these global trading markets was dependent on its membership of the EU. Within Ireland itself, a reason for this political oversight was that the department of the Taoiseach took a directing role in Irish foreign affairs without necessarily prioritising deepening Ireland’s relationship with Europe. This created a situation whereby Ireland’s staff at Brussels ‘frequently had to rely on their personal judgment in the absence of instructions from Dublin’.¹⁷

Despite this hesitancy, Ireland was evidently more inclined to identify with the EU’s efforts to promote a common political and cultural identity for Europe than its nearest neighbour. No political party within the Irish state joined the British Conservative Party (which also represented the Ulster Unionist Party) in the small European Conservative group within the European Parliament. Fine Gael allied itself with the Republican Party of France and the German Christian Democrat and Christian Socialist parties in the European People’s Party, which was the largest, as well as most federalist, party within the European Parliament. Within the medium-sized Party of European Socialists, the Irish Labour Party joined the British Labour Party, which also practically abandoned its former euroscepticism. The Irish Labour Party had recently taken a lead in forming a non-governmental ‘Institute of International and European Affairs’ in Dublin. During 1994, Dick Spring became the first Irish Labour Party leader to serve as an Irish foreign minister in a Fine Gael-led coalition which also featured a strongly pro-European Labour minister for finance.¹⁸ Fianna Fáil, a nominally republican party that was eager to disassociate itself from what it saw as its more conservative past, was allied to the smaller Liberal Democrat group within the European Parliament,¹⁹ as were the Progressive Democrats, a small breakaway party from Fianna Fáil that, up until its demise in the mid-2000s, sat in a few Fianna Fáil-led coalition governments and encouraged the pro-business trend of favouring foreign direct investment, low corporation tax rates and privatisation of former semi-state companies.²⁰ One of its founders, Pat Cox, who had been a member of the European Parliament since 1989, would serve as president of the European Parliament from 2002 to 2004, a president of the European Movement International and later, after joining Fine Gael, president of the Jean Monnet Foundation for Europe. John Bruton, who was Taoiseach of the Fine Gael-led coalition government between 1994 and 1997, would later serve as a vice-president of the European People’s Party and, in the post-Amsterdam Treaty era, an EU ambassador to the United States, in the process becoming one of the first Irish leaders to essentially transfer entirely to the EU political arena, which he identified with not least because of his Christian-democratic values.²¹

Ireland’s national development plans were sustained by the EU’s regional development, or ‘cohesion policy’, funds up until 2007. This shaped Ireland’s longstanding desire to secure equality of representation for both small and large states at meetings of the European Council of foreign ministers.²² The UK was inclined to judge that this preoccupation, combined with Ireland’s lack of ‘great power status’, was the only logical explanation for the seeming inclination of the Irish to ally themselves with both the Mediterranean entrants into the EC during the 1980s as well as the new central and eastern European entrants to the EU after 1995.²³ However, there were also some ideological reasons for Ireland’s identification with the experimental nature of the European project, including its piecemeal and sequential approach to attaining an effective monetary union.²⁴ In particular, Pádraig MacKernan, Ireland’s former chief representative at Brussels who succeeded to the position of general secretary of Ireland’s department of foreign affairs in 1995, particularly admired how Europe’s approach to security considerations was based upon ‘a political commitment, as distinct from a legal obligation’.²⁵ Under MacKernan’s six-year tenure, over twenty new Irish embassies were established in Europe, Latin America and Asia, while there would be an ever-growing tendency to view Anglo-Irish relations as only one aspect of Ireland’s European identity.²⁶ However, in common with his predecessor Noel Dorr, he believed that although Ireland’s prosperity depended on Europe, the level of Irish intellectual engagement with Europe was slight, not least because Ireland’s business, academic and media communities were focused largely upon the UK.²⁷ The recent suggestion by Anne Anderson, as Irish ambassador to America, that ‘we may appeal to hearts and minds, but it is those who control the purse strings that can wield the greatest influence’²⁸ perhaps also reflected a belief that Ireland’s diplomatic and cultural identities were frequently out of sync.

Ever since 1952, a civil service tradition had existed whereby the leader of the Anglo-Irish division of Ireland’s foreign service usually succeeded to the key position of general secretary of the Irish department of foreign affairs. Sean O’hUiginn, who performed diplomatic roles for Ireland in London, Washington and Maryfield during the 1990s, later recalled that this administrative tradition had become so deeply rooted and was considered to be such a natural situation that ‘nobody objects to it’.²⁹ The Irish department of foreign affairs was actually inclined to see ‘the origins of our special relationship with the United States’ as being rooted in the exact same dynamic as Ireland’s relationship with the United Kingdom, as well as the British Commonwealth, because ‘the long and complex history of our relationship with Great Britain has influenced many key aspects of our foreign policy’, and, therefore, ‘an awareness of its impact is crucial to an understanding of Ireland’s foreign policy and the concerns which underlie it’. Therefore, ‘a number of extremely important bilateral relationships – for example with Britain and the US – will remain critical to Irish foreign policy priorities’ notwithstanding the fact that, ‘through our membership of the European Union, Ireland is now in the mainstream of European decision making’ and that 72 per cent of Irish exports now went to the EU (one-third of which went to the United Kingdom). The 1996 Irish foreign policy white paper also noted that ‘the still unresolved question of Northern Ireland’ ensured that ‘building and sustaining the peace process on this island will continue to be the key priority around which other priorities are ranked’.³⁰

Brigid Laffan, a prevalent Irish scholar of European integration, judged that Irish government officials tended to rely upon a process of social interaction between a small number of department heads in order to create some ‘common understandings and norms’ without necessarily formulating any clear strategic interests or approaches towards Europe.³¹ This absence of strategic thinking may explain why Sean O’hUiginn deemed John Hume to be ‘probably the most significant character in Irish politics in the second half of the twentieth century’ and to be a quite exceptional figure primarily because ‘his strategic insights were paramount’.³² By 1994, Hume was convinced that Ireland should be concentrating almost entirely on promoting closer US–EU relations.³³ As it was ‘the biggest single market in the world’, Hume realised that the EU could make anywhere on the island of Ireland a basis for European headquarters of American firms. Meanwhile, on the understanding that the EU was the greatest ‘peace process’ anywhere on the globe since 1945, Hume would invite UN secretary-general Kofi Annan and future EU president Romano Prodi to speak before a new American-inspired Tip O’Neill Centre for Peace Studies in Derry.³⁴

The Irish department of foreign affairs certainly agreed with Hume that the EU was a model of attaining ‘unity in diversity’. It noted that ‘Europe is not a melting pot in which national identities are destined to be submerged or lost. On the contrary, it is intended to be a place where variety is a strength rather than an encumbrance, where differences are not denied but understood and accommodated.’³⁵ On the other hand, the Irish government was acutely conscious that accommodating the British government’s perspective and priorities regarding Northern Ireland was always a diplomatic necessity. In the short term, this would be reflected by the transfer during 1997 of Dermot Gallagher, formerly Irish ambassador at Washington D.C., to the position of secretary-general of the department of the Taoiseach and the Irish government’s chief administrator in the peace process. He would prioritise such responsibilities until such time as he ultimately replaced MacKernan as secretary-general of the department of foreign affairs in 2001.³⁶ Dublin also had every reason to take into account that the europhilia of John Hume as the leader of the SDLP was very atypical within Northern Ireland. Both the main unionist parties and Gerry Adams’ Northern edition of a Sinn Féin party were very eurosceptic. Ian Paisley’s DUP actually prioritised European Parliament representation only as a means of finding an additional means of protesting against any outside interference in Northern Ireland’s affairs.³⁷ London fully supported this stance. Reflecting this, a reference to the need for ‘new approaches’ in the light of the European political context within the British and Irish government’s joint declaration on Northern Ireland in December 1993 had almost been excised at Britain’s request.³⁸ This was despite the fact that the EU, which had been both monitoring and contributing to the International Fund for Ireland since 1989, was in the process of creating a perpetual peace task force to ensure that as much as 80 per cent of its financial support would reach disadvantaged communities in the border counties.³⁹ Between 1995 and 1997, the EU would provide £350 million for the economic development of Ulster and its border regions by means of its Special Support Programme for Peace and Reconciliation.⁴⁰ This was done on the understanding that the border counties of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland were the areas which had been most badly affected economically by the Troubles and, some would argue, by the very partition of Ireland itself.⁴¹

By 1994, the Irish government’s secretariat in Belfast was led by David Donoghue, a former Irish ambassador to the Holy See. After diplomatic postings in central Europe and Russia, Donoghue would later succeed (as Ireland’s representative at the UN) in co-drafting a UN declaration on human rights that won almost universal approval. However, during the 1990s he was not entitled to play any direct role in the Northern Ireland peace process. This was because the Maryfield secretariat could only act in an advisory capacity to the Irish and British governments.⁴² In this capacity, the Maryfield team occasionally attempted to co-draft reports on the Northern situation to assist Senator George Mitchell’s four-man American team who first arrived in Belfast in February 1995 to promote America’s involvement in the International Fund for Ireland, but Mitchell’s team would actually be subject to character assassinations by the Belfast press whenever it was suspected that they may possibly be listening to Irish nationalists. This essentially highlighted to Mitchell why the Irish government had always exhibited a tendency to walk on eggshells in its dealings with London or Belfast regarding Northern Ireland circumstances.⁴³

An early peak in American involvement in the peace process was Bill Clinton’s decision to make the first-ever visit of an American president to Northern Ireland at the end of November 1995. By this time, soldiers were off the streets, police searches of civilians had ceased and new businesses and employments were being created in Ulster.⁴⁴ Remarkably, Clinton chose to address the general public at open-air events,⁴⁵ while he gave the keynote speech of his visit on a factory floor in west Belfast. On this occasion, he was accompanied by members of the ‘Friends of Ireland’ US Congressional Group, US Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown and Admiral William Crowe, the US ambassador to Britain and the former chairman of the US armed forces’ joint chiefs of staff under Reagan and Bush’s Republican administrations of the 1980s. Emphasising that his government was the first US administration to give the International Fund for Ireland (first anticipated in 1977 and nominally established in 1986) its ‘official support’, Clinton noted that it was going to promote not only job-training and job creation but also women’s groups and cross-community sporting events. He cited the civil war history of his home state of Arkansas as proof that Hume’s favourite American expression – the possibility of attaining ‘unity in diversity’ – was always possible, as if America and Europe had managed to achieve this, so too could Northern Ireland, provided it had ‘the courage of an open mind’ to forgive, transcend differences and engage in honest dialogue with a desire to ensure that ‘everybody can win’.⁴⁶ The positivity surrounding Clinton’s visit, however, would prove to be shortlived.

David Trimble, the new leader of the Ulster Unionist Party and a former law lecturer in Queen’s University Belfast, viewed any American involvement in Northern Ireland, as well as Clinton’s visit, ‘with great reserve’.⁴⁷ John Hume was hoping that ‘a new Ireland will evolve’ through an all-island ‘vote for an agreed Ireland’ that was based on an understanding that ‘their common interests are economic development’ and that, within the orbit of the EU, ‘it is the people of Ireland who are divided, not the territory’.⁴⁸ By contrast, Trimble believed that the only purpose of the peace process must be the restoration of the historic Stormont assembly that had been disbanded in 1972. If there was to be any American involvement, it must be directed solely towards that end: ‘the only thing which I cared about was getting Clinton into Stormont’.⁴⁹ Trimble was not happy that Clinton had celebrated the fact that the British and Irish governments had decided on a ‘twin track approach’ to solve the Northern peace process between them. This was because he considered it very damaging to give any credence to the idea that Northern Ireland needed outside assistance, because this might be seen to support the southern Irish idea that it was a flawed political entity. In support of Trimble’s stance, the Northern Ireland secretary of state had already told the US state department at Washington D.C. that the holding of all-party talks within Northern Ireland must be the sole focus of the peace process. He also argued that the decommissioning of all paramilitary weapons must be a prerequisite to the holding of such talks. This practically gave the secret paramilitary organisations (the membership of which sometimes overlapped with security forces) a veto over the whole process. John de Chastelain, a former head of the Canadian Defence Forces, was employed alongside George Mitchell and the Irish government’s suggested peace envoy, Harri Holkeri, a former Finnish prime minister and future UN general assembly chairman, to oversee a decommissioning process. However, to the dismay of Sinn Féin leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, the IRA broke its ceasefire in February 1996 for an undisclosed reason.⁵⁰

The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) had given assurances to Senator Mitchell that figures like Gerry Adams had no authority over secret paramilitary organisations like the Provisional IRA. However, unionists were thereafter able to make the complete exclusion of Sinn Féin from party talks a requisite for their own willingness to participate on the grounds that Sinn Féin and the IRA were one and the same thing.⁵¹ Dublin had often championed this same perspective on the basis of police intelligence. On this occasion, however, Dublin and London responded by suggesting that Sinn Féin could be allowed back into negotiations if the IRA reinstated its ceasefire. This would not occur for another sixteen months, not least because loyalist paramilitaries had also broken their ceasefire. In the meantime, Mitchell faced frequent demands from many unionists that he cease all involvement in Northern Irish affairs on the grounds that only de Chastelain, being a fellow British citizen, could be entitled to interest himself in the UK’s internal affairs. David Trimble risked not giving his formal approval to this stance, however, as he had to counterbalance Ulster unionists’ desire to remove American influence from the peace process with his ultimate end objective of securing American support for his envisioned restoration of Stormont.⁵² Meanwhile, the peak of Taoiseach John Bruton’s involvement in the peace process came in March 1996 when he gave a speech at the White House that echoed John Hume’s ongoing call for a tripartite approach to the negotiations that involved both the British and Irish governments, not just all the Northern Ireland parties.⁵³ No further negotiations were possible, however, until the return of new British and Irish governments in the summer of 1997 because of Ulster unionist opposition.

Bruton had actually preferred that his foreign minister Dick Spring would take responsibility for the Irish government’s necessary involvement in the peace process,⁵⁴ not least so that he could concentrate on assuming the role as Ireland’s president of the European Council (July–December 1996). In this capacity, Bruton helped to arrange an Amsterdam Treaty (1997) that saw the creation of an EU foreign policy representative to the rest of the world and a simultaneous introduction of a common visa policy, leading to the abolition of purely national passports for citizens of all EU member states. Be that as it may, the Irish government felt it necessary to join the British government in not giving its full assent to this EU common visa policy, prompting Brussels to allow for a unique opt-out arrangement for both countries. A ‘common travel area’ arrangement had existed that was unilaterally governed by Britain’s Ireland Act (1949), which stated that Ireland was not to be regarded in the UK as a foreign country for legal purposes. Combined with the UK’s Immigration Act of 1971, this was the basis for Britain’s claim to common citizenship rights to vote, work and receive social security payments to all residents within the two states, notwithstanding their differing electoral systems, constitutions, labour laws and social security systems. The Irish government gave its consent to this principle under the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, but it had effectively always been encouraged to abide by this situation, particularly in the post-1969 period, because it made security operations along the Irish border, which cut across almost two hundred roads, sufficiently inexpensive that the Irish government could handle this challenge.⁵⁵ This ‘common travel area’ arrangement was now also postulated by Britain, however, as a potential solution to the seemingly perpetual divide within Northern Ireland. This was because it could potentially form a legal basis for people in Northern Ireland to identify themselves as Irish, British or both without interfering in any way with the existing law of the United Kingdom.⁵⁶ As Pat Cox would point out, however, the common travel area was ‘not specifically provided for in legislation’ within Ireland. Instead, its first formal ‘legal recognition’ in Ireland would actually be the EU’s Amsterdam Treaty of 1997, which had provided for it as a special provision within the overall operations of the EU’s ‘Schengen Area’ common visa policy.⁵⁷ EU treaties were not only the basis of European law but had also been binding on Irish law ever since Ireland’s Maastricht Treaty referendum of 1992. Therefore, in Irish law, the Amsterdam Treaty was the sole legal basis of the operations of Ireland’s common travel area with the United Kingdom.⁵⁸

By the time of the Amsterdam Treaty, a new Fianna Fáil–Progessive Democrats coalition, led by Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, had been elected as an Irish government. Acting on the advice of Martin Mansergh, a new peace process team led by foreign minister David Andrews decided to emphasise the potential role of the churches in promoting peace and reconciliation within Northern Ireland. Mansergh’s Northern clerical and lay intermediaries had recently introduced him to Mary MacAleese, a Catholic vice-chancellor and director of legal studies at Queen’s University Belfast. John Hume declined, with regret, an invitation to stand for election as president of Ireland,⁵⁹ but MacAleese was chosen as the Fianna Fáil candidate for Ireland’s 1997 presidential election. On her nomination and return, she adopted a rhetoric of ‘building bridges’ as a theme of her presidency. This was essentially a euphemism for her personal longstanding interest in religious ecumenism, partly as a means of dealing with both the internal divide within Northern Ireland and the North’s poor relations with the Republic of Ireland.⁶⁰ This was a significantly different approach to the post-1994 idea that vocal American support for the International Fund for Ireland could help to persuade Northerners to reach a political agreement. With regards to Ireland, US President Bill Clinton acted at all times on the understanding that he could do no more than speak occasionally on the advice of George Mitchell. Reflecting the Irish government’s current approach, Mitchell would suggest to Clinton during 1997 and again in 1998 that he speak to all Irish church leaders. Therefore, although Clinton personally identified with and admired John Hume’s political vision, on the few occasions that the US president did speak on Northern Ireland thereafter, he would emphasise the churches’ capacity to promote peace and reconciliation rather than his initial emphasis upon either the role of the International Fund for Ireland or changes in the political landscape of Europe.⁶¹

During 1997, a new British Labour government under Tony Blair implemented a policy of making the Bank of England an independent arbiter of British monetary policy. This was done while introducing a devolution programme for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland so that English representation in the Westminster parliament could work in conjunction with the Bank of England in influencing British monetary policy without undue Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish influence. This was also done to assist the Bank of England in its preparations for maintaining the existing competitive advantage of sterling as the principal currency traded in foreign exchange markets worldwide, alongside the US dollar and the Japanese yen, before the European Central Bank and its envisioned Euro could be formed as a rival currency in June 1998.⁶² This was why Blair was adamant that May 1998 must be made the absolute deadline for reaching a political agreement in Northern Ireland. On this understanding, the British and Irish governments rushed through a compromise solution during the spring of 1998.⁶³

For Ireland, The Agreement of the spring of 1998 was significant for two reasons. First, it was put successfully to an all-Ireland referendum vote that May. Second, it was an international agreement, signed by both the British and Irish governments (in addition to Northern Irish representatives), that was subsequently registered at the UN as an aspect of international law. At the risk of being blasphemous, Irish nationalists often mistakenly referred to it as the ‘Good Friday Agreement’, nominally because it was signed on a day of significance to all Christians, while Irish and British unionists often mistakenly referred to it as the ‘Belfast Agreement’ to denote their belief that it did not involve the Republic of Ireland and that the all-Ireland vote on the matter was a legal irrelevance. The UN chose an alternative title: the Northern Ireland Peace Agreement.⁶⁴ Although it technically repealed the Government of Ireland Act of 1920,⁶⁵ the most controversial aspect of The Agreement within Northern Ireland was that, in dealing with the issue of paramilitaries, it was decided to allow an amnesty for all alleged political prisoners in return for the continued operations of de Chastelain’s decommissioning body for as long as was deemed necessary. This was a messy compromise that would give birth to a healthy, if very native, brand of Ulster political satirism.⁶⁶ For Ireland as a whole, the most significant aspect of The Agreement was the creation of several cross-border institutions. A north–south ministerial council without executive powers was established for the purposes of economic consultation, but its existence was made entirely co-dependent with that of the Northern Ireland Assembly as a devolved British parliamentary assembly. Therefore, the north–south ministerial council would be disbanded in the event of a restoration of direct rule by London. As a concession to unionists, a British–Irish Council, without executive powers and with its secretariat based in Edinburgh, was created to include Irish and British government representatives, and this replaced the secretariat in Maryfield, Belfast, which was disbanded. Finally, the Northern Ireland Assembly itself was to embody a power-sharing arrangement whereby a ministry could only be established if it had the consent and support of both the largest unionist and nationalist party within Northern Ireland. On this level, The Agreement was partly a modification of the ‘three-strands solution’ that George Mitchell, acting not least on the advice of Hume, had first suggested during October 1996.⁶⁷ However, it also enhanced the tradition, first established in 1981, of regular British–Irish intergovernmental conferences without necessarily involving any direct Northern Ireland representation beyond its secretary of state, a British cabinet position first established in 1972 and which continued to exist.

As he desired nothing more than the restoration of Stormont, David Trimble was so opposed to the north–south strand of The Agreement that Hume was uncomfortable about the idea of serving in the proposed Northern Ireland Assembly as a deputy leader to Trimble. Therefore, Hume chose Seamus Mallon to take his place as the SDLP’s leading representative, or Trimble’s deputy first minister, in the new Northern Ireland Assembly. Mallon was a tough negotiator and a much greater sympathiser than Hume with the notion of the MacBride Principles, which were popular among Ulster Catholics and had begun to influence but never came to formally define the legal operations in America of the International Fund for Ireland.⁶⁸ In deference to Trimble, Tony Blair invited US President Bill Clinton but no Irish government personnel to the initial meeting of the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont that September. On this occasion, Mallon emphasised simply that ‘we are of the people of Ireland’. Meanwhile, Clinton emphasised his belief that all the specifics of The Agreement must not be ignored, such as the establishment of a new and more widely acceptable policing system to what had existed in the past; the promotion of cross-border community projects with the Irish government; the promotion of small businesses within Northern Ireland; and the creation of grassroots non-governmental organisations to heal community divisions.⁶⁹ By contrast, David Trimble emphasised simply that ‘Northern Ireland is back in business.’ Having succeeded in getting Clinton to attend an assembly at Stormont, he told the US president directly, before occupying Clinton’s chair on the platform, that ‘I will hold you to your claim to support peace’ by scrutinising the extent to which the American government proved itself capable of being a champion of democracy in the future. To Trimble’s mind, America’s capacity to be democratic was dependent upon its willingness to support the UUP in ensuring that Northern Ireland henceforth became the island of Ireland’s sole ‘gateway to Europe’ on behalf of the United Kingdom.⁷⁰ In this way, Trimble effectively spoke for traditional Ulster unionist culture, which had been defined since the days of James Craig by an almost religious belief that maintaining a competitive advantage for British business interests on the island of Ireland, via Belfast, was essential to the preservation of democracy, the Union and a civilised international order. On Trimble’s advice, British state subsidies for Northern Ireland would continue to focus largely on the Lagan Valley area and Belfast, which received a massive budget covering both the extensive redevelopment of its quays and the building of new Northern Ireland Assembly buildings. By contrast, as soon as Clinton returned to the United States, the factory in the disadvantaged area of west Belfast that had hosted President Clinton’s keynote speech during his 1995 visit was shut down.⁷¹

In October 1998, John Hume was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in recognition of his status as ‘the clearest and most consistent of Northern Ireland political leaders’. For having ‘showed great political courage’ in defying accepted notions of unionist majority rule within Northern Ireland, David Trimble was awarded a prize as well, although this reputation was sufficient to ensure that, henceforth, both Trimble’s London Tory biographers and the Ulster unionist community itself began to turn against him, as if he was a cowardly compromiser with an enemy.⁷² The DUP actively opposed The Agreement. The Nobel Committee also recognised the part played by the Irish, British and American governments in creating peace in Northern Ireland after three decades of disturbances that had tragically cost over three thousand lives. In the process, it was argued, they had provided hope ‘to inspire peaceful solutions to other religious, ethnic and national conflicts around the world’.⁷³ On accepting his prize two months later, Hume chose to welcome the fact that the European Convention of Human Rights was ‘to be incorporated into the domestic law of our land [Northern Ireland] as an element of the Good Friday Agreement’ before delivering an effective eulogy about the relevance of the EU to the future of Ireland:

We in Ireland appreciate this solidarity and support, from the United States, from the European Union, from friends around the world … Peace could not have been won without this good will and generosity of spirit … The European [Union] visionaries decided that difference is not a threat … Difference is the essence of humanity … therein lies a most fundamental principle of peace: respect for diversity … Two major political traditions share the island of Ireland. We are destined by history to live side by side … No-one is asked to yield their cherished convictions or beliefs. All of us are asked to respect the views and rights of others as equal to our own … That is what a new, agreed Ireland will involve … I want to see Ireland, North and South, the wounds of violence healed, play its rightful role in a Europe that will, for all Irish people, be a shared bond of patriotism and new endeavour.⁷⁴

Ireland continued to differ, however, from certain EU legal norms. An unprecedented rise in the number of asylum seekers from outside the EU (almost 10,000 a year) encouraged the Irish state to pass a number of immigration laws after 1998. While Ireland was expected to harmonise its practices with the Common European Asylum System, it could only comply with this system ‘to the maximum extent compatible with the maintenance of its Common Travel Area with the United Kingdom’.⁷⁵ Prior to The Agreement, Articles Two and Three of the Irish constitution had referred to ‘the whole island of Ireland’ as a ‘national territory’ but also stated that this assertion had no direct legal implications ‘pending the re-integration of the national territory’.⁷⁶ During 1999, these were replaced by referendum with new articles that referred exclusively to the concept of citizenship, while also noting that ‘a united Ireland shall be brought about only by peaceful means with the consent of a majority of the people, democratically expressed, in both jurisdictions in the island’. This was considered necessary in light of the fact that the original terminology, which had always been deemed unnecessary by many sympathisers with the idea of a united Ireland (including John Hume, who would retire due to ill health in 2004), had been cited by some Northern Ireland paramilitaries as an alleged cause of their conflict. With regards to the Irish state’s international identity, both Articles Three and Twenty-Nine of the Irish constitution, which covered the state’s international relations, were modified to recognise that new cross-border bodies without executive functions now had an authority to act. In Article Three, however, it was stated that, in theory, ‘institutions with executive powers and functions that are shared between those jurisdictions may be established’.⁷⁷ Reflecting this, historians of Ulster politics tended to view The Agreement as evidence that both the British and Irish governments desired ‘that any settlement – whatever its form – is publicly seen to reflect their planning and their wishes’. London was particularly concerned that ‘any final deal over British Ireland will be offered to world opinion as a reflection of the strategies and dignity of the imperial government’, even if ‘the most convincing recent prospect for a settlement reflects a European model of consociationalism’, whereby power-sharing was to be established by means of reaching agreement upon some overarching common standards.⁷⁸ In so far as this was true, the existence of the EU and its emerging traditions of cultural diplomacy was a significant inspiration for the existence of The Agreement.

By 1998, a ten-year programme of trade diversification had led to Ireland enhancing its trade with every European state, while also maintaining, on an ever-rising scale, a positive balance of total trade. By the mid-to-late 1990s, total Irish exports to the EU had risen to 18,880 million pounds, compared to 2,500 million pounds to the United States. To many observers, this was a revolutionary change because just twenty years previously total Irish exports had amounted to just £400 million. Membership of the European Single Market had also facilitated a rise in Irish exports specifically to the United Kingdom (6,000 million pounds to Britain and 750 million pounds to Northern Ireland), while there was also a rise in exports to countries like Japan (800 million pounds).⁷⁹ Although the Irish currency had nominally been independent ever since 1979, by the mid-1980s Ireland’s membership of the European Monetary System had been expected to lead to its eventual acceptance of a European Monetary Union.⁸⁰ Ireland’s adoption of the euro currency as soon as it went into circulation in 2002 saw the volume of annual trade between Ireland and China grow rapidly to $6.4 billion,⁸¹ while shortly thereafter new Irish export markets developed in countries such as Russia (€600 million).⁸² In the realm of financial services, new Irish links with Latin America and the Middle East would reach billions of euros’ worth of trade over the next decade because of Ireland’s membership of the Eurozone, reflecting the principal advantage of the euro over the Irish pound: the direct access it provided to global financial markets.⁸³

These sudden advantages acquired by Ireland led to something of a counter-reaction in Belfast. In particular, Ireland’s adoption of the euro in 2002 coincided with an alleged bank raid by nationalist revolutionaries within Northern Ireland that saw the Northern Irish Assembly collapse for five years. The fact that a former Northern Ireland secretary of state served as the European commissioner for trade during much of this period does not appear to have helped significantly in remedying this dispute.⁸⁴ The decision to restore power-sharing to Northern Ireland was ultimately made possible by means of a Saint Andrews Agreement (2007). This was signed in Edinburgh, the home of the standing secretariat of the (non-executive) British–Irish Council which met biannually and also included representation from the devolved UK assemblies of Scotland and Wales (as well as the Crown dependences of Jersey, the Isle of Man and Guernsey). The existence of this assembly and London’s insistence upon Irish governmental participation if it wanted to have a voice regarding Northern Ireland was essentially a reflection of the ongoing British Commonwealth desire to keep Ireland as closely tied to its orbit as was possible. To most observers, the chief significance of the Saint Andrews Agreement was that it led to the creation of a new Northern Irish Assembly in which the longstanding majority parties, the UUP and the SDLP, were now reduced to being a minority voice. The new first minister was DUP leader Ian Paisley, who retired in 2008 and was replaced by his understudy Peter Robinson, while Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin served as deputy first minister.

By 2008, €849 million had been provided in economic assistance to Northern Ireland by means of the International Fund for Ireland.⁸⁵ Some considered that it was this development, rather than the attitudes of local politicians, that was the essential reason why the peace process had evidently reached a fairly successful conclusion. If so, credit for creating this situation rested largely with international supporters of the Irish government in institutionalising this fund. Up until 2007, Ireland had used some of its EU regional development or ‘cohesion policy’ funds to promote plans for common tourism, electricity and agricultural production plans by means of the North–South Ministerial Council. Non-partisan Ulster businessmen had been inclined for some time to consider that an all-island economy actually made a great deal of sense, although the east–west divide within Northern Ireland, both in terms of British state subsidies and voting patterns, evidently continued.⁸⁶ A traditional belief in Dublin was that all-Ireland economic and political cooperation could operate harmoniously so long as Belfast recognised the extent to which its economy and, in turn, that of Ulster as a whole would naturally benefit from integrating with that of the island as a whole rather than attempting to enforce an opposite trend.⁸⁷ In 2009, David Cooney, a London-born official with Ireland’s London embassy, succeeded Dermot Gallagher as secretary-general of the Irish department of foreign affairs, technically making him the first non-Irish born holder of that office. He had played a quite pivotal role in the Anglo-Irish negotiations during the late 1990s due to his popularity with all sides,⁸⁸ and this might explain why he was chosen to become the administrative head of foreign affairs in the wake of the Saint Andrews Agreement.

The admission of nine central and eastern European republics (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithunia, Malta, Slovenia) into the EU during Ireland’s 2004 presidency of the European Council was widely considered to have elevated Ireland’s standing in international relations to that of a more ‘middle-sized’ power because of the extent to which its European performance was deemed worthy of emulation by the EU’s newest member states.⁸⁹ By 2000, the department of the Taoiseach was the only Irish government department that did not also have staff working in Brussels, as both the office of the attorney general and the department of defence had just appointed delegates for the first time. The latter development led the department of defence to issue its first official white paper. This drew attention to the fact that Irish army troops were embarking on (EU-supported) UN peacekeeping operations in Kosovo, East Timor and Bosnia, but there was also a need for the development of Ireland’s naval and air corps to support such troops. Ever since the 1980s, even the Irish state’s minimal defence budget for its own coastguard services was sustained mostly due to European structural funding.⁹⁰ With EU support, after 2000, seven fully up-to-date Irish patrol ships were commissioned. In addition to continuing to assist in EU fisheries protection and anti-smuggling work, they occasionally provided supplies to Irish troops on UN missions abroad.⁹¹ However, when Irish troops joined the peacekeeping mission in Chad in central Africa (where many Irish non-governmental organisations were already active), it would be necessary to hire Russian helicopters to transport Irish troops because the Irish air corps was forbidden to take part in overseas operations and kept entirely unarmed at the insistence of the government. This fact had already limited the relevance of the development of the Irish navy for national defence purposes because it meant that it was not allowed to develop aircraft carrier functions.⁹² The latter decision was taken despite a recent upgrading of Ireland’s air defence capabilities (as represented by the army’s purchase of surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft guns), evidently because it was decided to minimise Ireland’s overall defence spending (0.6 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product), which was kept at the lowest rate in all of Europe.⁹³ The Irish government may have feared that increases in defence spending would serve only to put diplomatic pressure on the country to join NATO.

Despite this deliberate under prioritising of defence budgets, Irish voters, albeit on a very low turnout, surprised the Irish government in June 2001 by rejecting the EU’s Nice Treaty, nominally due to a fear of militarism. The Nice Treaty was intended to grant each EU state a number of seats on the European Council to match the size of a country’s population. Irish voters feared that this could result in a compromising of Irish military neutrality through the country being perpetually outvoted under the European Council’s proposed ‘qualified majority voting’ scheme. This led the Irish government to secure from the EU a ‘Seville Declaration’ that recognised the perpetual applicability of the Irish ‘triple lock’ procedure, whereby the sending of Irish troops abroad had to be approved not just by the UN (whose Security Council had the authority to validate a war)⁹⁴ but also by a vote of the Irish cabinet and the entire Dáil. This being secured, Ireland became the last European country to accept the Nice Treaty in October 2002. By that time, the Irish army had begun to benefit slightly from the launch of the first-ever strategic studies programme in an Irish university as well as an associated Defence Forces Review.⁹⁵

Popular fears of the outbreak of major international wars grew considerably after the United States made an essentially unilateral decision to occupy Iraq in the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York in September 2001 by a terrorist group that evidently stemmed from somewhere in the Middle East. As a member of the UN Security Council at the time, Ireland had expressed support for the idea of weapons inspections of Iraq only, rather than an invasion, but this advice was ignored.⁹⁶ In February 2003, simultaneous protests against the invasion of Iraq were held in many European capitals, with the greatest of these being held in London (about one million people) as a result of Britain’s support for the invasion. An anti-war demonstration in Dublin attracted about 100,000 people and led to public debates as to whether or not Ireland should continue to offer landing rights to American military aircraft at Shannon.⁹⁷ While a prominent French government official cited these trends as evidence that a ‘new European nation’ was manifesting itself on the streets,⁹⁸ academics in Britain and elsewhere generally voiced their support for those Americans who claimed that a new era in history had begun in the wake of the attack upon the World Trade Center whereby ‘the implications of international migration for security’ must henceforth be treated as the predominant security concern of all countries, in both their national and international relations, as part of a greater ‘war against terror’.⁹⁹ The reputed role of Islamic religious fundamentalists in inspiring conflict was also sufficient to persuade some prominent British academics to expand upon Anthony Giddens’ initial thesis of a supposed divide between cosmopolitans and religious fundamentalists within Europe by suggesting that religion had now actually become an enemy of the entire civilised world.¹⁰⁰ This trend of thought certainly served to lessen the influence of the hitherto strong Christian-democratic tradition within Europe.

This emphasis on migration as a security threat was actually quite polemical in a European context because nine central and eastern European republics (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithunia, Malta, Slovenia) were just about to join the EU after they accepted the common visa policy of the Schengen Area, as had the non-EU European Free Trade Association (Switzerland, Norway, Liechtenstein and Iceland).¹⁰¹ Sean O’hUiginn, then Ireland’s ambassador to America (and subsequently Germany), told a recent American National Security advisor that he considered the military occupation of Iraq to be a very irresponsible policy, not least because the United States had recently spent billions of dollars on developing more sophisticated surveillance tools for intelligence purposes supposedly to avoid precisely such situations.¹⁰² Meanwhile, some Irish army officers pondered whether or not the invasion of Iraq had made the UN more irrelevant than ever as a forum for regulating the implementation of international law.¹⁰³ Nevertheless, in public, the Irish government was far less inclined to criticise the Anglo-American alliance regarding the Iraq war. Perhaps reflecting this, a professor of government at University College Cork wrote a study on European security challenges that emphasised the supposed new threats of ‘migration’ and ‘weapons of mass destruction’.¹⁰⁴ Likewise, a study of the degree to which ‘changes in the Republic of Ireland’s international role’ were taking place judged that the country evidently accepted the emerging ‘Anglo-American narrative’ of international relations more so than the vantage point of a ‘European republic’.¹⁰⁵

Just as the Russian Federation had done, along with the neutral European powers of Austria, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland and Malta, Ireland had joined the NATO-sponsored ‘partnership for peace’ programme during the 1990s to indicate its willingness to support all non-military peacekeeping operations.¹⁰⁶ However, both this development and the principle of ‘permanent structured cooperation’ (PESCO) introduced into the EU’s defence and security policy by the December 2007 Lisbon Treaty would be questioned in some Irish circles.¹⁰⁷ Not least to satisfy Britain, the EU’s Lisbon Treaty made the European Parliament a bicameral institution with the European Council of Ministers and also provided a legal mechanism for any member state to leave the Union. An Irish referendum on the treaty was due to be held in June 2008, just a month after Bertie Ahern, an increasingly unpopular Taoiseach, resigned from office to face a corruption charge. Voting against his government (which had been in power for over a decade), only 47 per cent of Irish voters agreed to the Lisbon Treaty in June 2008, but in the face of a growing economic recession – stemming from the virtually simultaneous announcement of a crisis in American and Irish banks in Stepember 2008 – 67 per cent of Irish voters chose to accept the Lisbon Treaty in October 2009.¹⁰⁸ Despite the pre-existing Seville Declaration, the issue of Irish neutrality was made the central issue in both these referenda. NATO’s criticisms of the EU’s lack of a defence policy in the wake of its failure to support Britain and America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq created fears of rising militarism. Britain, France and Germany did create a ‘European Union Military Staff’ that tested the possibility of creating EU ‘battle groups’, but there was subsequently little or no will to either fund or deploy such forces.¹⁰⁹ Reflecting this, when the EU did actually draft a new security strategy it emphasised simply that ‘the fundamental framework for international relations is the UN Charter’ and that ‘strengthening the UN is a European priority’.¹¹⁰ If a change took place in the Irish government’s attitude at this time, it was that it became increasingly inclined to define Irish military neutrality as being the same as that of all other small neutral European states: the country would always remain neutral, unless attacked, but it would always be prepared to consider supporting any peacekeeping missions that were sponsored by the UN and the EU. For the Irish army, both the NATO-affiliated, yet independent, ‘partnership for peace’ programme and the EU’s PESCO programme enhanced its capabilities to engage in such missions by increasing its level of access to the latest technical developments and training programmes.¹¹¹ Crucially, unlike NATO states, Ireland retained the unilateral right to determine the extent to which it cooperated with such bodies.

Some Irish opponents of the Lisbon Treaty deemed that the essential issue at stake was whether or not the country should be ‘joining EU collective defence in order to improve the Union’s capacity to shape globalisation’.¹¹² Monnet professors of European studies now existed in most Irish universities,¹¹³ but some Irish academics had actively campaigned against the Lisbon Treaty on the grounds of their resentment of the growing pro-European tenor of Irish academic institutions.¹¹⁴ Within some all-island academic forums, schools of literary scholarships actually deemed Ireland to be a postcolonial society, akin to the Third World countries within the Non-Aligned Movement at the UN,¹¹⁵ rather than the pro-European state actor in international relations that the Irish state had both defined itself as and was generally recognised to be ever since the mid-1970s. This evidently reflected a lack of engagement by Irish academics with intellectual trends on the continent. By contrast, Ireland’s Austrian embassy served as Dublin’s permament liaison with all those international organisations based in Vienna that were focused primarily on the closer integration of central and eastern Europe into EU structures and this campaign was focused upon the role of universities. In this context, Irish foreign ministers’ typification of Europe as ‘a marketplace of ideas’ meant that it was generally seen to be a benevolent, if not a powerful, ally of central and eastern European nations at various intergovernmental conferences.¹¹⁶ Since 1991, Vienna had promoted a federation of central and eastern European universities to dwell on the potential role of all European metropolises on both a national and an international level.¹¹⁷ The central experience of the former eastern bloc was judged to be that its cities’ wealth had been used not for their own development but instead had been used to bolster ‘inert economies in the Soviet Union’, with the end result that central and eastern European cities had suffered unnecessarily from the same inertia as Russia’s great cities.¹¹⁸ A prioritisation of urban development and a desire to undo through international dialogue (not least with Scandinavia) all ‘stereotypes’ regarding east–west relations that had been established at the time of the Helsinki Act of 1975 was the essential goal of this university campaign, but most Irish minds evidently had little time for the new pan-Europeanism espoused by writers such as Norman Davies.¹¹⁹

In the wake of neutral Austria’s entry into the EU during 1995, the ‘Committee of Security and Cooperation in Europe’, first established in 1975, became known as the ‘Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe’ (OSCE). Its strongly academic vision of Europe was soon challenged by NATO powers who, upon joining the OSCE (in the process expanding its membership to over fifty nations), asked it to adopt a rather different approach. It was now called upon to focus exclusively upon assessing, or even policing, the degree to which central and eastern European commercial media were equally as ‘free’ as the western European media was supposed to be. Unsurprisingly, Irish army and foreign affairs staff who liaised with the Austrian embassy and the OSCE became conscious of the challenges that this peculiar mandate involved.¹²⁰ The Defence (Amendment) Act formally authorised Defence Forces personnel to take part in OSCE operations during 2006. The Russian Federation’s principal forum for interacting with the EU had always been the CSCE/OSCE, through which its rather unique cultural status as both a European and extra-European nation could sometimes find a voice. Nevertheless, its relations with that body were often strained because the Russian leader Vladimir Putin believed that the economic challenge of maintaining internal security within a multi-ethnic Russian Federation was either being downplayed or deliberately ignored by a Western media that attributed an undue significance to his former status as a USSR intelligence officer.¹²¹ Noting rising trading relations between Russia and Ireland, as well as with Europe as a whole, during 2007 Ireland’s ambassador to the Russian Federation welcomed the fact that Putin favoured Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organisation to prevent future trade wars and also expressed support for the work of the European Court of Human Rights. Russia supplied the EU with a high percentage of its oil and gas and had become a stable economy by 2007, a decade after suffering a financial crash under Boris Yeltsin. Meanwhile, the EU provided 70 per cent of all foreign direct investment within Russia.¹²² Partly as a result, European perspectives of Russia sometimes differed from those of America or even Britain, although an aggressive foreign policy rivalry, arising from an expansionist impulse, could also shape European attitudes towards Russia because of the legacy of central European fears of Russian militarism.¹²³

During 2008, Padraig Murphy, a former Irish ambassador to the USSR, was given an EU monitoring mission in Georgia, while during 2012 an OSCE conference on peacekeeping would be held in Dublin, to which spokesmen from the Northern Ireland Assembly were also invited.¹²⁴ Eamon Gilmore, an Irish foreign minister who was later made an EU special envoy to the Colombia peace process, would be given the responsibility of supervising the situation in Moldova (bordering Romania and Ukraine) in his capacity as OSCE chairman. At the same time, Pat Cox, an Irish veteran of European projects, was given the responsibility of monitoring allegations of corruption within the Ukraine,¹²⁵ which would experience an upheaval two years later in the wake of a Russian incursion into the Crimea. In its performance of these responsibilities, Ireland adopted EU policy but also expressed a closer sense of identification with the ‘group summit’ tradition of joint meetings of the political leaders and central bankers of the world’s wealthiest nations as a basis of the international order. This system was first launched by the G7 summits in the wake of the Helsinki Act of 1975 and it was a forum to which Russia was later added. The UK, which hosted six such summits, invited an Irish Taoiseach to attend one such forum, purely as an observer, when it was held in Northern Ireland during 2013. This was the only time that an Irish representative had ever been able to attend a group summit conference.¹²⁶

Within Ireland, it was often assumed that multinationals operating in the country from the 1960s until the 1990s were primarily American and thereafter became mostly European. As late as the 2010s, however, as much as 70 per cent of all foreign direct investments in Ireland came from the United States (over $200,000 million), which constituted about 10 per cent of all American investments in Europe or roughly 5 per cent of all American foreign direct investments in the world.¹²⁷ Total annual Irish exports to America would be valued at over €200,000 million (about 15 per cent of total Irish exports), while the process of American firms establishing themselves in Ireland also played a part in encouraging more Irish firms to establish themselves in America. During 2009, of international companies operating on the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York, only the countries of Israel, Canada and Japan had more companies than either Ireland or the United Kingdom, which each had five.¹²⁸ Be that as it may, the staffing of Ireland’s diplomatic representation in America remained much lower than the European average.¹²⁹ Meanwhile, Ireland had not necessarily lost its reputation as a satellite economy. Mostly foreign-owned pharmaceutical companies in Ireland accounted for 48 per cent of all Irish exports and stimulated 12 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product, but provided only 2 per cent of the country’s employment. This was an imbalanced situation.¹³⁰

A new tradition of G20 summits was first launched in Washington D.C. in November 2008 in response to an American fiscal crisis that was reputedly caused by a prolongment of its occupation of Iraq. Subgroups adopted by the G20 for deciding the rotating chair at its regular summits would appear to have reflected a shifting international balance. For instance, Russia was now grouped with India and Turkey to reflect its role as an intermediary between Asia and Europe. Reflecting its desire to exercise a strong economic influence over both the British Commonwealth and the Middle East, the US was grouped with Canada, Australia and Saudi Arabia. This formed a significant contrast to the far more geographically homogenous Far Eastern, Latin American and European groupings within the G20, with the UK being included exclusively within the European group. As such, these groups practically reflected the prioritisation of new regional trading blocs as a fixed entity. By 2010, the Euro had become the world’s second-most traded currency after the US dollar. However, the top five individual countries in the world in terms of the highest volume of trade – China, the United States, Germany, Japan and Britain – were no doubt still conscious of their ‘great power’ status, with the perhaps notable exception of Germany because of its status as the monetary centre of EU. Due to the EU’s status as ‘an important global actor, supported by its size and diversity, its economy and its experience of promoting common approaches over five decades of integration’, Ireland now decided to make it ‘the primary framework through which we pursue many of our foreign policy goals’, including Ireland’s own commitment to encouraging a fuller integration of the European continent into the Eurozone as a matter ‘of principle’.¹³¹ Meanwhile, an Irish army officer judged that Russia had no intrinsic problem with the integration of eastern European countries into the EU: it simply felt that the formal incorporation of many of these countries into the NATO collective security arrangement was essentially an unfriendly act.¹³²

A former Finnish president, who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his role in mediating past conflicts in Kosovo and Iraq, emphasised on a visit to Dublin that reports of the Global Peace Index indicated that ‘Europe remains the most peaceful region in the world’, not least because of the successful operations of the EU as a proven forum for multilateral negotiations between member states based on effective foreign policy consultations.¹³³ Like most EU countries, Ireland generally supported all member states’ right to continue to prioritise their own purely national diplomatic priorities at the UN.¹³⁴ Be that as it may, by 2010 Ireland was evidently a strong believer that the EU, as much as the UN, had a key diplomatic role to play in bringing peace to the Middle East and Africa, albeit by relying on purely economic, rather than military, channels.¹³⁵ A period of instability in the pivotal state of Egypt and the emergence of civil war in Syria after it was suspended from the Arab League (and suspended itself from the Mediterranean union) in 2011 weakened but did not halt the ‘Union for the Mediterranean’ project, while the EU also assisted refugees fleeing from Syria. During 2015, the Irish navy provided assistance to over ten thousand such refugees as part of the EU’s strategy of promoting mutually beneficial economic cooperation between the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds, respecting but transcending their differences by means of finding common grounds of economic interest.¹³⁶ Meanwhile, as president of the Jean Monnet Institute, Ireland’s former EU president Pat Cox worked as the coordinator of an intended new EU ‘transport corridor’ to improve links between Scandinavia and the Mediterranean region.¹³⁷ This effectively laid a basis for the EU’s Polish-led Three Seas Initiative, which was intended to create a common market linking the Baltic, Adriatic and Black Seas.

During 2010, a shocking bailout programme for most Irish banks necessitated the intervention of both the European Central Bank and the IMF. It also saw anti-European, as well as anti-American, sentiment seemingly reaching a peak during a subsequent period of austerity. Evident failures of party politics, as well as a seeming disconnection between the operations of the so-called ‘global economy’ and humanitarian notions of social justice, became a common subject of Irish debate both before and after the first-ever state visit to Ireland by a British monarch.¹³⁸ Internationally, the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the Bank of Canada and the Bank of Japan had all played a major role in dealing with the international financial crisis of 2008. In Ireland, the Central Bank of Ireland’s direct affiliation with the European Central Bank ensured that a European stability mechanism was utilised. This meant that the Irish state, in intervening to prevent a crash of the Irish banking system, could remain secure in the knowledge that the resulting long-term debts would be made manageable under an EU-supported national recovery plan. Although this Irish banking crisis essentially originated in the United States, two-thirds of the assistance that Ireland received to help it manage its banking problems came directly from the European stability mechanism.¹³⁹

If such debts cast a shadow upon the Irish state’s performance throughout the 2010s, Ireland’s role in international relations was widely perceived to have become proactive rather than reactive, certainly when compared to the situation as late as the 1980s. It was not until 2011 that the Irish government finally decided to fully integrate the state’s trading priorities into its foreign policy formation. While this did not result in major changes to the parameters of the Irish department of foreign affairs’ operations,¹⁴⁰ it reflected a trend whereby thirty-two offices of Enterprise Ireland, which was established purely to assist Irish rather than international companies (unlike the IDA), were now directly affiliated with Irish embassies abroad.¹⁴¹ This integrated approach to international trade could be interpreted as a sign that Irish foreign policy was truly coming of age by actively promoting rather than merely representing Irish interests abroad. Irish government policy regarding the IFSC and Ireland’s corporate tax rate remained the prerogative of the department of the Taoiseach, however, whose role in acting as a pillar of the state’s foreign policy formation, particularly in terms of determining a unitary stance, remained very strong,¹⁴² partly because of an established political tradition in Ireland of the Taoiseach, rather than the foreign minister, representing the country at European Council meetings.

Not long after the Irish department of foreign affairs was renamed the ‘Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’, a new foreign policy white paper was created. This effectively committed Ireland to a strategy of acting as a European hub within the global economy. This was done in recognition of the fact that Ireland’s status as ‘a longstanding and fully engaged member of the European Union’ was the most ‘significant factor in the stabilisation of our national finances’ and, in turn, ‘in our bourgeoning economic recovery’. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, Ireland’s representation abroad had almost doubled in size to over sixty diplomatic and twenty consular offices, which was roughly in keeping with the European norm for small states. In addition to the operations of sixteen other state agencies and the activities of approximately eighty honorary consuls, these were practically managing Irish relations with 178 different countries, albeit in many cases with the most minimal of staffing.¹⁴³ In the belief that ‘our security, our prosperity and the well being of our own people are connected to the wider world as never before’, it was decided ‘to coordinate across all government departments and state agencies’ a foreign policy based on the relevance of the ‘global economy’ to Irish trade, tourism and investment. On the premise that ‘nothing is entirely foreign or wholly domestic’, it was also judged that ‘foreign policy is more important to us now than at any time in our history’.¹⁴⁴ Nevertheless, Ireland’s foreign ministers also maintained that the ‘same principles’ and ‘enduring values’ were ‘a common thread which runs through our foreign policy from the foundation of the state’ a century previously.¹⁴⁵ The relative significance, or applicability, of these claims shall now be assessed to form this book’s conclusion.

Endnotes

1 Peter Sutherland, ‘Interview as ex-director general of the World Trade Organisation (9 Feb. 2011)’, accessible through https://www.wto.org

2 D.R. Wightman, ‘Europe and the dollar’, Irish studies in international affairs, vol. 4 (1993), 13–18.

3 John Pinder, The European Union (Oxford, 2001), 150–3.

4 Ronan Fanning, ‘The Anglo-American alliance and the Irish question in the twentieth century’, in Judith Devlin, H.B. Clarke (eds), European encounters (Dublin, 2003), quote p. 211.

5 Valur Ingimundarson, ‘The American dimension: Britain, Germany and the reinforcement of US hegemony in Europe in the 1990s’, in Klaus Larres (ed.), Uneasy allies: British–German relations and European integration since 1945 (Oxford, 2000), 165–83.

6 Chris Brown, Kirsten Ainley, Understanding international relations (3rd ed., London, 2015).

7 Brian Cowen, ‘Challenges to liberal internationalism’, Irish studies in international affairs, vol. 12 (2001), 1–5.

8 Frans Alting von Geusau, ‘Cultural diplomacy and national stereotypes: for official use only?’, in Teresa Walas (ed.), Stereotypes and nations (Cracow, 1995), 247–51.

9 Jacek Purchla (ed.) The historical metropolis: a hidden potential (Cracow, 1996); Judith Devlin, ‘The city as symbol: architecture and ideology in post-Soviet Moscow’, in J. Devlin, H.B. Clarke (eds), European encounters (Dublin, 2003), 363–404.

10 Jacek Purchla (ed.) The historical metropolis: a hidden potential (Cracow, 1996). In Ireland, Mary Harney, as deputy Irish prime minister (Tánaiste) and leader of the short-lived but influential Irish ‘Progressive Democrats’ party (1993–2005), argued that not to have faith in politics was not to have faith in civilisation, and the essence of civilisation was to prioritise urban rather than rural development. Joe Mulholland (ed.), Why not? Building a better Ireland (Dublin, 2003), 34–8.

11 Fintan O’Toole, The ex-isle of Erin: images of a global Ireland (Dublin, 1997), 11–12; Mairéad Considine, Fiona Dukelow, Irish social policy (Dublin, 2009), 161, 166, 203, 217.

12 Department of foreign affairs and trade, The Irish in Latin America (Dublin, 2016).

13 Department of foreign affairs and trade, Celebrating sixty years: Ireland–Japan diplomatic relations (Dublin, 2017). Among the Irish companies who attempted to break into the Japanese market after 1993 were Bewleys and Guinness (which was merged with British firm Diageo in 1997).

14 Fan Hong, Jorn-Carsten Gottwald (eds), The Irish Asia strategy and its China relations 1999–2009 (Amsterdam, 2010).

15 Stephen Loyal, Understanding immigration in Ireland: state, capital and labour in a global age (Manchester, 2011), 154–9.

16 Denis O’Hearn, The Atlantic economy: Britain, the US and Ireland (Manchester, 2001).

17 Brigid Laffan, ‘Managing European dossiers in the Irish civil service’, in Mark Callanan (ed.), Foundations of an ever closer union: an Irish perspective on the fifty years since the Treaty of Rome (Dublin, 2007), 190–3 (quote p. 193).

18 Ruairi Quinn, Straight left: a journey in politics (London, 2005), chapters 13–14.

19 Patrick Keatinge, Brigid Laffan, ‘Ireland in international affairs’, in John Coakley, Michael Gallagher (eds), Politics in the republic of Ireland (2nd ed., Dublin, 1993), 227–49, especially p. 238.

20 Stephen Collins, Breaking the mould (Dublin, 2006), 230–40.

21 John Bruton, Faith in politics: a collection of essays on politics, economics, history and religion (Dublin, 2015).

22 Mark Callanan (ed.), Foundations of an ever closer union: an Irish perspective on the fifty years since the Treaty of Rome (Dublin, 2007), 83, 85–6, 94–5,187–8, 232–3.

23 J.W. Young, Britain and European unity 1945–1999 (London, 2000), 188; D. Naurin, H. Wallace (eds), Unveiling the council of the EU: games governments play in Brussels (London, 2010), 33–4.

24 Brigid Laffan, The finances of the European Union (London, 1997).

25 Dermot Keogh, Ireland and Europe (2nd ed., Dublin, 1990), 265 (quote), 267.

26 Patrick Keatinge, Brigid Laffan, ‘Ireland in international affairs’, in John Coakley, Michael Gallagher (eds), Politics in the republic of Ireland (2nd ed., Dublin, 1993), 227–49.

27 John Cooney, Tony McGarry (eds.), Ireland and Europe, 141, 216 (reported speeches of Padraic MacKernan and Noel Dorr).

28 Paul McArthur, The MacBride principles (Liverpool, 2002), 156 (quoting Anne Anderson).

29 ‘Interview with Sean O’hUiginn’, Edward Kennedy Oral History Project (PDF available online), 3.

30 Department of foreign affairs, Challenges and opportunities abroad: white paper on foreign policy (Dublin, 1996), 52–3, 64–5, 321.

31 Brigid Laffan, ‘Managing European dossiers in the Irish civil service’, in Mark Callanan (ed.), Foundations of an ever-closer union (Dublin, 2007), 189, 191.

32 ‘Interview with Sean O’hUiginn’, Edward Kennedy Oral History Project (PDF available online), 8–9.

33 John Hume, ‘A personal view’, in J. Dooge, R. Barrington (eds), A vital national interest: Ireland in Europe 1973–1998 (Dublin, 1999), 327–33.

34 ‘Interview with John Hume’, Edward Kennedy Oral History Project (PDF available online), 5–13.

35 Department of foreign affairs, Challenges and opportunities abroad: white paper on foreign policy (Dublin, 1996), 58.

36 Senator George Mitchell, Making peace: the inside story of the making of the Good Friday Agreement (London, 1999), 105–6, 149.

37 Although then a minority unionist party within Northern Ireland, the DUP had consistently won the majority of unionist votes for representation in the European Parliament ever since Northern Ireland representatives were first admitted to that assembly in 1979. Brendan O’Leary, John McGarry, Explaining Northern Ireland (Oxford, 1995), 201.

38 Brendan O’Leary, John McGarry, Explaining Northern Ireland (Oxford, 1995), 416, 409.

39 Gerard Collins, ‘The European Union and the peace process in Northern Ireland’, Études Irlandaises, vol. 22 no. 2 (1997), 149–59.

40 Colonel Michael Beary, ‘Peace dividends and statecraft instruments: United States and EU economic intervention facilitating peace in Northern Ireland’, Defence Forces Review (2010), 91.

41 C. O’Grada, B.M. Walsh, Did (and does) the border matter? (Institute for British–Irish Studies, University College Dublin, 2006).

42 David Donoghue, plenary speech at ‘Multilateralism and interdependence: prospects and challenges’ conference, Royal Irish Academy, 2 May 2018.

43 Senator George Mitchell, Making peace: the inside story of the making of the Good Friday Agreement (London, 1999), 20, 90–5, 105–6, 149.

44 ‘President Clinton’s remarks at Londonderry 1995’ (courtesy of the William J. Clinton Presidential Library, on YouTube). It was on welcoming Clinton to Derry that John Hume announced the formation of a Tip O’Neill Chair of Peace Studies at the University of Ulster.

45 He would do the same on a brief visit to Dublin to receive the freedom of the city. This took place on 1 December 1995, a day after his visit to Northern Ireland. ‘President Clinton’s remarks in Dublin, Ireland, 1995’ (courtesy of the William J. Clinton Presidential Library, on YouTube).

46 Quote from ‘President Clinton’s remarks at the Mackie Plant 1995’ (courtesy of the William J. Clinton Presidential Library, on YouTube).

47 Michael Fitzpatrick, John Hume in America (Dublin, 2017), quoting Trimble, p. 178.

48 ‘Interview with John Hume’, Edward Kennedy Oral History Project (PDF available online), 5–13.

49 Dean Godson, Himself alone: David Trimble and the ordeal of unionism (London, 2004), quote 392.

50 Adams gives his own account of the situation surrounding the IRA breaking its ceasefire in Gerry Adams, An Irish voice (Dingle, 1997), 201–7.

51 Senator George Mitchell, Making peace: the inside story of the making of the Good Friday Agreement (London, 1999), 24–32.

52 Senator George Mitchell, Making peace, 40–2, 47–63.

53 Michael Fitzpatrick, John Hume in America (Dublin, 2017), 177–8.

54 Nora Owen and Hugh Coveney of Fine Gael would assist Dick Spring. Senator George Mitchell, Making peace, 105.

55 Stephen Loyal, Understanding immigration in Ireland: state, capital and labour in a global age (Manchester, 2011), 66–8.

56 Imelda Maher, The common travel area: more than just travel (Royal Irish Academy and British Academy, 2018), 3–4.

57 Pat Cox, Europe after Brexit (Lausanne, 2016), 17–18.

58 Brian Doolan, Principles of Irish law (6th edition, Dublin, 2003), 82.

59 Sean Farren (ed.), John Hume in his own words (Dublin, 2018), 291–2.

60 Justine McCarthy, Mary McAleese: the outsider (Dublin, 1999), 148, 155, 158, 169–71.

61 Senator George Mitchell, Making peace, 105–6, 149; ‘President Clinton’s address to the Northern Ireland Assembly, 3 September 1998’ and ‘President Clinton’s address to the people of Armagh, 3 September 1998’ (courtesy of the William J. Clinton Presidential Library, on YouTube).

62 David Sinclair, The pound (London, 2000), 271–2.

63 Senator George Mitchell, Making peace, 103.

64 Northern Ireland Peace Agreement, https://peacemaker.un.org/sites/peacemaker.un.org/files/IE%20GB_980410_Northern%20Ireland%20Agreement.pdf.

65 Ibid., 4.

66 Newton Emerson, The last of the Portadown News (Dublin, 2006). The author later became an Irish Times columnist.

67 Senator George Mitchell, Making peace, 85.

68 The Irish National Caucus was keen to claim that the MacBride Principles were the essential basis of the peace settlement on the grounds that individual American state assemblies, as opposed to the federal government, passed resolutions expressing sympathy with them. Sean McManus, My American struggle for justice in Northern Ireland (Cork, 2011), 187–8, 247–51.

69 Clinton’s speech was partly a reaction to the fact that a recent bombing in Omagh by a supposed IRA splinter group was being used by some as a justification for demanding the immediate cessation of all cross-border schemes. Both the US president and Mallon’s speech can be seen in the video ‘President Clinton’s address to the Northern Ireland Assembly, 3 September 1998’ (courtesy of the William J. Clinton Presidential Library, on YouTube).

70 David Trimble’s speech can be seen in the video ‘President Clinton’s address to the Northern Ireland Assembly, 3 September 1998’ (courtesy of the William J. Clinton Presidential Library, on YouTube).

71 This was Mackie International, a textile-machinery and engineering plant, which had existed since the 1840s but ceased operations in 1999. For the state of the company during 1995, see ‘President Clinton’s remarks at the Mackie Plant 1995’ (courtesy of the William J. Clinton Presidential Library, on YouTube).

72 Dean Godson, Himself alone: David Trimble and the ordeal of unionism (London, 2004), 841.

73 https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1998/press-release/.

74 https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1998/hume/lecture/.

75 Ursula Fraser, Colin Harvey (eds), Sanctuary in Ireland: perspectives on asylum law and policy (Dublin, 2003), quote p. 28.

76 Bunreacht na hÉireann (Dublin, 1937), 4.

77 Bunreacht na hÉireann (Dublin, 2004), 6 (quote), 116.

78 Alvin Jackson, ‘Ireland, the Union and the Empire’, in Kevin Kenny (ed.), Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford, 2004), 152.

79 Fionan O’Muircheartaigh (ed.), Ireland in the coming times, 38–40.

80 W.F. Duisenberg, ‘EMU and Ireland: happy together?’, in Fionan O’Muircheartaigh (ed.) Ireland in the coming times: essays to celebrate T.K. Whitaker’s eighty years (Dublin, 1997), 55–67. Duisenberg was then president of the European Monetary Institute in Frankfurt.

81 Fan Hong, Jorn-Carsten Gottwald (eds), The Irish Asia strategy and its China relations 1999–2009 (Amsterdam, 2010), 99.

82 Justin Harman, Dermot Ahern, ‘Russia’s global perspective: defining a new relationship with Europe and America’, Irish studies in international affairs, vol. 19 (2008), 3–8.

83 Government of Ireland, Global Ireland: Ireland’s global footprint to 2025 (Dublin, 2018), 33, 36, 39.

84 This was Peter Mandelson of the British Labour Party who, along with Chris Patten and Catherine Ashton, was a major British player in the EU at the time.

85 Colonel Michael Beary, ‘Peace dividends and statecraft instruments: United States and EU economic intervention facilitating peace in Northern Ireland’, Defence Forces review (2010), 91.

86 Michael D’Arcy, Tim Dickson (eds), Border crossings: developing Ireland’s island economy (Dublin, 1995). Ulster businessmen, as well as Peter Sutherland, Tony O’Reilly and a number of academics from across the island, contributed to this publication.

87 Sean Milroy, The case of Ulster (2nd ed., Dublin, 1922); Michael Kennedy, Division and consensus: the politics of cross-border relations 1925–69 (Dublin, 2000).

88 Senator George Mitchell, Making peace, 105–6, 149.

89 B. Tonra, M. Kennedy, J. Doyle, N. Dorr (eds), Irish foreign policy (Dublin, 2012), 9–12, 60, 131; Ben Tonra, Global citizen and European republic: Irish foreign policy in transition (Manchester, 2006). Bertie Ahern, a Fianna Fáil Taoiseach, served as Ireland’s EU president during 2004.

90 Tom MacGinty, The Irish navy: golden jubilee (Tralee, 1995), 190.

91 Aidan McIvor, A history of the Irish naval service (Dublin, 2006), 217–21.

92 Joe Maxwell, P.J. Cummins, The Irish air corps: an illustrated guide (Antrim, 2009), 218–20.

93 Ben Tonra, ‘Security, defence and neutrality: the Irish dilemma’, in B. Tonra, M. Kennedy, J. Doyle, N. Dorr (eds), Irish foreign policy (Dublin, 2012), 235.

94 Ibid., 222–4.

95 Mark Callanan (ed.), Foundations of an ever closer union (Dublin, 2007), 182. The contents of the Defence Forces review are freely available online.

96 B. Tonra, M. Kennedy, J. Doyle, N. Dorr (eds), Irish foreign policy (Dublin, 2012), 67.

97 Ibid., 110.

98 Timothy Garton Ash, Free world (London, 2004), quote p. 54.

99 S. Castles, M.J. Miller, The age of migration (4th edition, London, 2009), chapter 9 (quote p. 207).

100 Michael Burleigh, Sacred causes: religion and politics from the European dictators to Al Qaeda (London, 2006).

101 Along with two more entrants into the EU during 2007 (the republics of Bulgaria and Romania), four significant powers – Sweden, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic – were not due to enter the Eurozone until the values of their currencies converged.

102 ‘Interview with Sean O’hUiginn’, Edward Kennedy Oral History Project (PDF available online), 30.

103 Ben Lindsay, ‘Unauthorised and pre-emptive use of force: is the authority of the UN irrelevant?’, Defence Forces review (2011), 99–104; Jean-Marc Coicaud, ‘The future of peacekeeping’, Defence Forces review (2008), 151–5.

104 Andrew Cottey, Security in twenty-first century Europe (2007, 2nd ed., London, 2013).

105 Ben Tonra, Global citizen and European republic: Irish foreign policy in transition (Manchester, 2006), 2, 83, 195.

106 Ray Murphy, ‘Europe’s return to UN peacekeeping? Opportunities, challenges and ways ahead – Ireland’, International peacekeeping, vol. 23 no. 5 (2016), 721–40. Although with other European neutrals (and non-NATO member states of the EU) such as Austria, Denmark, Sweden and Finland, Ireland had ‘observer status’ in the old Western European Union (WEU) defence arrangement (established in 1954 as part of a modification of the Brussels Treaty of 1948) from 1992 until its disbandment in 2011.

107 Karen Devine, ‘The ethos and elements of Irish neutrality’, in I.S. Novakovic, Neutrality in the 21st century: lessons for Serbia (Belgrade, 2013), 67–78. This book was published with the support of the Swedish Armed Forces.

108 Karen Devine, ‘Irish political parties’ attitudes towards neutrality and the evolution of the EU’s foreign, security and defence policies’, Irish political studies, vol. 24 no. 4 (2009), 467–90.

109 Commandant Ian Byrne, ‘Clearing the EU “fog of war”: ends, ways and means’, Defence Forces review (2012), 15–25; Ronan Corcoran, ‘Ready for battle?: the EU battle group as EU force projection’, Defence Forces review (2013), 63.

110 Tony Cudmore, ‘Ireland’s presidency of the Council of the EU and the development of the CSDP in 2013’, Defence Forces review (2013), 53–60, quote p. 55.

111 John Doyle, ‘Defence, security and the Irish EU presidency’, Defence Forces review (2013), 7–14.

112 Karen Devine, ‘The ethos and elements of Irish neutrality’, in I.S. Novakovic, Neutrality in the 21st century: lessons for Serbia (Belgrade, 2013), 67–78 (quotes p. 77).

113 This included the independent National College of Ireland that had initially been founded by the Jesuits purely as a business school. Nicholas Rees, a former author for Trócaire, assumed the position of its Monnet professor. Brigid Laffan, another former author for Trócaire, was a Monnet professor at University College Dublin (a college of the National University of Ireland) and the European University in Florence. She then became director of the latter body’s director of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies as well as director of its Global Governance Programme.

114 Ruan O’Donnell, F. Keoghan, M. Quinn (eds), A festschrift for Anthony Coughlan: essays on sovereignty and democracy (Dublin, 2017). This publication was designed to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the campaign against the Lisbon Treaty.

115 Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (Dublin, 1996).

116 Mark Callanan (ed.), Foundations of an ever closer union (Dublin, 2007), 77, 113, 239–40 (quote from Irish foreign minister Brian Cowen, p. 239).

117 Jacek Purchla (ed.), The historical metropolis: a hidden potential (Cracow, 1996).

118 Ibid., 131, 132 (quote), 179, 249 (quote), 254; Judith Devlin, ‘The city as symbol: architecture and ideology in post-Soviet Moscow’, in J. Devlin, H.B. Clarke (eds), European encounters (Dublin, 2003), 363–404.

119 Teresa Walas (ed.), Stereotypes and nations (Cracow, 1995), 13, 21; Jacek Purchla (ed.), The historical metropolis, 254.

120 Commandant Mark Hearns, ‘From Vancouver to Vladivostok with Valentia in between: Ireland’s chairmanship of the OSCE’, Defence Forces review (2011), 123–32.

121 Ibid.

122 Justin Harman, Dermot Ahern, ‘Russia’s global perspective: defining a new relationship with Europe and America’, Irish studies in international affairs, vol. 19 (2008), 3–8.

123 Amy Verdun, G.E. Chira, ‘The Eastern partnership: the burial ground of enlargement hopes?’, Comparative European politics, vol. 9 (2011), 448–66.

124 J.C. O’Shea, ‘The Irish OSCE chairmanship and the aftermath of the 2008 war in Georgia’, Defence Forces review (2013), 48–50. The Northern Ireland speakers at the OSCE conference in Dublin on 28 April 2012 were Peter Robinson (first minister) and Martin McGuinness (deputy first minister), while former American envoy George Mitchell also attended, as did British, Russian and European representatives.

125 J.C. O’Shea, ‘The Irish OSCE chairmanship and the Transdniestrian Settlement Process’, Defence Forces review (2012), 1–6.

126 Department of foreign affairs and trade, The global island: Ireland’s foreign policy for a changing world (Dublin, 2015), 7. Perhaps reflecting this growing dispensation, Dan O’Brien, an Irish-born journalist with The Economist who later became an economist for Dublin’s Institute for International and European Affairs, effectively wrote a panegyric about the G20 summits within his collection of essays, Ireland, Europe and the world: writings on a new century (Dublin, 2009).

127 Department of foreign affairs and trade, A focused policy review of Ireland’s bilateral diplomatic mission network in the United States of America (Dublin, 2017), 11, 19–20.

128 Dan Senor, Saul Singer, Start-up nation: the story of Israel’s economic miracle (New York, 2009), 12–13.

129 Department of foreign affairs and trade, A focused policy review of Ireland’s bilateral diplomatic mission network in the United States of America (Dublin, 2017), 11, 19–20.

130 John O’Hagan, ‘The Irish economy 1973–2016’, in T. Bartlett (ed.), Cambridge history of Ireland (Cambridge, 2017), 518.

131 Department of foreign affairs and trade, The global island, 69.

132 Commandant Mark Hearns, ‘From Vancouver to Vladivostok with Valentia in between: Ireland’s chairmanship of the OSCE’, Defence Forces review (2011), 123–32.

133 Martti Ahtisaari, ‘The role of the European Union in conflict resolution’, Irish studies in international affairs, vol. 18 (2017), 195–99.

134 It had been suggested that there should be a permanent EU representative on the UN Security Council, but there was little or no support for this idea. R. Wong, C. Hill (eds), National and European foreign policies (London, 2011), 79, 85, 90–1.

135 Department of foreign affairs and trade, The global island: Ireland’s foreign policy for a changing world (Dublin, 2015), 71.

136 Pat Burke, ‘Troubled waters’, Defence Forces review (2016), 177–87; Brian Fitzgerald, ‘Ireland – an islander’s perspective’, Defence Forces review (2016), 192–6.

137 Pat Cox, Europe after Brexit (Lausanne, 2016).

138 Conor McCabe, Sins of the father: tracing the decisions that shaped the Irish economy (Dublin, 2011). Michael D. Higgins, Causes for concern (Dublin, 2006), 305–20.

139 Of the €67.5 million provided in support, the European stability mechanism provided €45 million and the IMF provided the remainder. The UK, Sweden and Denmark also provided bilateral loans of nearly €5 million. Diarmuid Smyth, ‘The recovery in the public finances in Ireland following the financial crisis’, Journal of the statistical and social inquiry society of Ireland (vol. 156, 2017), 150–73; Central Bank of Ireland, A chronology of main developments 1943–2013 (Dublin, 2013), 34–5, 48–54.

140 B. Tonra, M. Kennedy, J. Doyle, N. Dorr (eds), Irish foreign policy (Dublin, 2012), xviii, 88.

141 Ibid., 188–90, 200–1. In 2012, Enterprise Ireland’s thirty-two overseas offices included fourteen in Europe, ten in Asia, three in North America, three in South America and two in the Middle East. In 2010, the IDA had six offices in America, nine in Asia and four in Europe (London, Paris, Frankfurt and Moscow).

142 B. Tonra, M. Kennedy, J. Doyle, N. Dorr (eds), Irish foreign policy (Dublin, 2012), chapter 6.

143 Department of foreign affairs and trade, The global island: Ireland’s foreign policy for a changing world (Dublin, 2015), 7, 77.

144 Ibid., introduction.

145 Charles Flanagan, ‘Identity and values in Irish foreign policy’, Irish studies in international affairs (2016), 1–5.