Maroc - EURASIAREVIEW.COM - A la une - 17/12/2025 00:51

The Irish Left’s Putin Problem – OpEd

By Konstantin Eggert (EurActiv) -- Russian military-grade drones penetrated Irish airspace to shadow Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s plane during the Ukrainian president’s official visit to Dublin in early December. The country’s public discussion this alarming news has served as a rather unpleasant reminder of a well-known fact – Ireland is completely defenceless. Or, rather, it is the British Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force that provide 24/7 cover for a country that has none of its own. Scores of vitally important transatlantic cables are laid in the country’s territorial waters. Shannon air base serves as a major hub for US and other NATO allies. Britain has a vital interest in Irish security; but does Ireland itself? The incident with drones fuelled the Irish discussion about the country’s neutrality and the desirability of joining NATO. This, according to the polls, is an explicit desire of about a third of the Irish people with another third remaining undecided. The most interesting actors in this dramatic debate are those who claim the drones were not Russian (or were a kind of UFOs) and Zelenskyy had no business visiting the ‘principally neutral’ Emerald Island. It is a relatively small but hyperactive group of leftists, mostly from Sinn Féin, Social Democrats and People Before Profit. They are NATO’s implacable public foes and Vladimir Putin’s staunchest advocates. The group includes, among others, TD (member of parliament) Paul Murphy from PBP and Daniel Lambert, manager of a hip-hop trio Kneecap, infamous for its lyrics bordering on anti-Semitism. At first glance, their position is contradictory. The Russian regime suppresses independent trade unions, persecutes LGBTQ people, promotes a chauvinistic brand of Orthodox Christianity and wages a brutal war of aggression – hardly an attractive mix for modern leftists. For example, Murphy publicly stated that he and his partner will bring up their child as ‘gender neutral’. In Putin’s Russia, they would not have had the time to utter “Karl Marx” before losing their parental rights and travelling to savour the sights and sounds of the Northern Urals in a penal colony. However, the realities of Russia – as well as Venezuela or Iran – do not matter for Ireland’s self-proclaimed “democratic socialists”. Just as they do not for some other segments of the European left. What does matter is Putin’s hostility to the West. In the Irish left’s provincial worldview, everything revolves around the dream of Irish unity under the banner of socialism. These fantasies feed visceral hatred of the US and especially Great Britain. In the eyes of Murphy and his ilk, Washington’s and London’s siding with Ukraine’s government (and people) automatically makes the country a puppet of an aggressive imperialist block not worthy of any support. Ireland’s newly elected president Catherine Connolly – arguably the world’s most left-wing democratically elected head of state today – always accompanies her lukewarm condemnations of Russia’s aggression with a “Yes, but NATO expansion was provocative”. It is music to Putin’s ears. The Kremlin is all too eager to help the Irish leftists promote such messages. “Whenever I mentioned Ukraine, swarms of Russian trolls immediately descended on my account,” Dan O’Brien, chief economist of the Institute of International and European Affairs in Dublin, told me. He is a popular social media commentator and one of several who constantly call out the Irish left for its pro-Russian stance. “They stick to the illusion that Ireland is so far away and so peaceful that Russia has no reason to attack it”, says O’Brien. Looking from NATO’s eastern flank, as this writer does, this is not illusion but delusion. Just ask the Poles and the Germans, who already experienced sabotage against storage facilities and transport infrastructure. Russian drones in Irish airspace were a deliberate mockery of Ireland’s neutrality and a clear warning: “We shall strike when and where we want.” Moscow wants Ireland to be scared. Ignoring this – as Ireland’s assorted leftists do – borders on treason. Or, to be more charitable, it means that although Lenin never used the oft-cited expression “useful idiots”, it doesn’t mean they do not exist. About the author: Konstantin Eggert is a Russian-born journalist with DW, Germany’s international broadcaster. He is based in Vilnius and was previously editor-in-chief of the BBC Russian Service Moscow bureau.