There are very significant economic advantages for Ireland in both the CTA and the air defence treaty-not-a-treaty. If the air defence treaty-not-a-treaty brouhaha tells us anything, it is something that we already know: our policy of military neutrality has run out of road (How you revoke a secret agreement with another sovereign state is another day’s work, but no doubt legal advice is involved.) Like some of the other peculiarities of our relationship with the UK, the logic – for both sides – of the air defence treaty-not-a-treaty trumps the spiteful instincts of even the pettiest of political minds. That said, throughout the entire Brexit shambles, there was no mention of the air defence treaty-not-a-treaty being revoked. But on the face of it they are not the sort of people you would want to be relying on to defend your country, never mind their own. It remains to be seen whether the duplicity, and at times outright stupidity, demonstrated by the ruling Conservative Party over the last decade or so is the exception or the rule. It may have served us well for the last 70 years but post-Brexit Britain is a very different kettle of fish to postwar Britain. There are good reasons to be cautious about the treaty-not-a-treaty with the UK. As a concept it does not sit well with some understandings of Irish nationalism. But now that details of it are well and truly out in the open it will undoubtedly cause disquiet in certain areas. The Government has relied on legal advice that the agreement fell below the definition of a treaty, meaning it could remain secret, but in truth the air defence treaty-not-a-treaty has been an open secret for many years – since the early 1950s, it seems. The obvious question being, who did we think was defending our skies? With the best will in the world there is little the Air Corps can do in this regard given the equipment at its disposal. The fact that Ireland relies on the Royal Air Force (RAF) for its air defence should come as a surprise to no one.
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