Ireland is slammed for free-loading off western countries to ensure its own security, in essay by influential London policy thinker

By Staff Reporter
Published 18th Dec 2023, 02:42 BST
Updated 18th Dec 2023, 11:39 BST
Dean Godson is director of Policy Exchange, the Westminster think-tank which is influential in helping shape the thinking of Conservative government. It is unusual for such establishment voices to criticise Ireland explicitlyDean Godson is director of Policy Exchange, the Westminster think-tank which is influential in helping shape the thinking of Conservative government. It is unusual for such establishment voices to criticise Ireland explicitly
Dean Godson is director of Policy Exchange, the Westminster think-tank which is influential in helping shape the thinking of Conservative government. It is unusual for such establishment voices to criticise Ireland explicitly
An influential Westminster policy expert has written a scathing criticism of Ireland for free-loading on security from the UK and other nations, while engaging in “rampant” Anglophobia.

Dean Godson, director of the centre right think-tank Policy Exchange, which is seen as often helping shape ideas within governments, in an essay in today’s News Letter explicitly criticises the Republic’s refusal to contribute properly to western defences.

(Click here to read the article: ‘Dean Godson: Ireland free-loads off UK on security, yet displays rampant post-Brexit Anglophobia,’ December 18)

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The article, which was first published in The Spectator magazine under the headline ‘Ireland’s security freeloading is a threat to Britain’, is highly unusual because notable political figures in London rarely criticise Dublin, no matter how frequently the Republic attacks the UK.

(Scroll down for more on this story. And click here to read editorial: ‘It is past time that UK ministers hit back at Irish criticism of Britain’)

Mr Godson writes that the Republic “is now on the new front line. Three-quarters of all cables in the northern hemisphere pass through Irish waters”. He says it is highly dependent in energy “importing 100% of its oil and 71% of gas”.

Yet, he writes, the Irish state remains “one of the biggest security freeloaders in Europe”. He says the UK taxpayer then “effectively foots many of the bills. All this obtains despite the rampant post-Brexit Anglophobia of much of the Republic – which, as so often, goes largely unremarked in the UK”.

Related topics:IrelandLondonEurope