Ireland ‘must invest in air and sea defences’, say security experts
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Ireland must invest in its air, sea and cybersecurity to fend off threats from hostile states, such as Russia, a number of military officers and academics have said.
The security experts point to incursions into Irish airspace by Russian aircraft as well as Russian submarine activity near the Irish Sea and highlight the lack of Irish air interception capability, with a dependence on the British RAF.
They highlight the threat to Ireland’s high-tech industry posed by both interference in undersea cables transmitting data across the Atlantic and a lack of investment in cybersecurity.
The experts, writing in the Defence Forces Review 2020, say the establishment of the Commission on the Future of the Defence Forces and the development of Ireland’s first National Security Strategy present opportunities for investment in security infrastructure.
Comdt Derek McGourty said that since the 2019 update on the 2015 White Paper on Defence, there have been “further incursions” by Russian military aircraft into Irish airspace, with reports also of increasing Russian submarine activity in the North Atlantic and Irish Sea.
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He said these developments have added to “growing concerns about Ireland’s inability to protect its critical national infrastructure including transatlantic fibre-optic cables that lie in Irish coastal waters”.
“The Irish Naval service has no anti-submarine capability and its ability to deter or even detect such maritime intelligence gathering is exceptionally limited," he said.
"Neither has Ireland got the radar, air defence, and air interdiction capability necessary to deter and monitor Russian or other aircraft entering Irish airspace without permission and instead relies on the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force to carry out this task on its behalf.”
Dr Viktoriya Fedorchak, Lecturer in European Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, said Ireland is “an ideal point” to destabilise regional security and undermine the UK’s defences.
She said Russian flights test national air defence capabilities in the region and give the Russians important information on the readiness of the RAF.
She argued that investment in national fighter jets for the Air Corps is the main solution to the current and future threats to the Irish State.
Quoting researcher Gustav Gressel, Eoin Micheál McNamara, a PhD researcher at the University of Tartu in Estonia, said: “The Kremlin still has a Soviet mindset. They see neutrality as tactical. Ireland is viewed as a weak spot for the enemy and nothing more."
Lt Ben Crumplin, attached to the Irish Naval Service, said that, in addition to the threat posed to undersea communication cables, there are threats to Irish ports, including from cyber attacks on the complex IT systems used in ports and in modern vessels.