DUBLIN

NEWS THAT IRISH police have complained that the country’s Defence Forces did not fire at suspicious drones flying near the Irish Capital during the recent visit of Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, has been met with a revelation that Irish military personnel do not tend to fire at potential threats as that might cause these threats to return fire.

“Irish military personnel are not so much soldiers as a section of the diplomatic service,” a former officer explained to the Kookaburra Bugle. “We don’t really do fighting; we watch other people fight and report on it to the United Nations. Occasionally, our lads and lassies find themselves under fire – usually by accident – and in that case they just hide. The special forces have had the odd encounter – and then there was the awful business in the Congo, the one Jamie Dornan eventually sorted out in the film, The Siege of Jadotville. That was all *Conor Cruise O’Brien’s fault. Why do you think he hated the secessionist rebels up North so much? It reminded him of his Katanga Secession disaster in the Congo. Anyway, the bottom line is we are neutral and like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, we stick our neck out for no man. We do virtue signalling, the moral high ground, priggish criticism, the supply of non-lethal equipment (so the recipient can spend that money on lethal equipment and we can feel our hands are clean), and diplomatic gymnastics. Remember how many American planes loaded with God knows what passed un-examined through Shannon during the War on Terror. And don’t talk to me about CIA flights bringing who to where to have what done to them.

“Those drones during the Zelenskyy visit didn’t do anything so why bother them? That would be the Defence Forces’s policy. Ireland only has one natural enemy. And for the moment that enemy is in a bad state, indeed such a bad state that the bit of Ireland we abandoned to her when we broke free a century ago, might come back to us just a little quicker than the current Irish Government would like. But that’s a whole other story of military indifference and standing idly by.”