Food price inflation is running at 13% in Ireland. The people creating policy are laughably unserious. The government is borrowing money to give to farmers to destroy the food supply. This is Robert Mugabe economic policy. https://t.co/K4oYnpwJu8
— Philip Pilkington (@philippilk) May 30, 2023
HOWEVER!!! Ireland as potential hidey-hole in the event of nuclear war:
From The Eriugena Review, May 30:
Neutrality as Ireland’s Strategic Super Weapon
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Irish commentators and politicians have lined up to attack yet another longstanding norm in the Republic: neutrality. This is a truly strange display and seems designed to try to curry favor abroad, something the current crop of commentators and politicians seem to prioritize over Irish national interest.
Ireland maintained its neutrality through far more controversial periods than we are currently experiencing, most notably in the Second World War. During the Second World War, the British in particular put enormous pressure on Ireland to jettison their position of neutrality but under De Valera’s leadership, the Irish never faltered. Today, on the other hand, many in Ireland, due to some combination of insecurity and obsession with foreign perceptions, want to ditch neutrality and join NATO. Some seem to even possess amusing delusions about how Ireland can play a part in a US-China conflict – apparently these people are less than acquainted with basic geography.
Yet the reality is that, as true leaders like De Valera knew well, Ireland joining NATO, or any other military alliance would not make any difference to that alliance. Doing so would be like a child pouring a bucket of water into the sea in the hope that the tide will rise. Thinking that a small country like Ireland, with no serious military, makes any difference to a large military alliance like NATO is based only on intellectual immaturity and juvenile conceit. The commentators and politicians who line up on the pier with their little buckets of water are only calling attention to their own intellectual shortcomings. They try to distract from these with moralizing and hectoring but it is obvious to serious people that they are, to quote the bard, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”Properly understood, neutrality is Ireland’s strategic super weapon. It was not designed this way. Although early Irish leaders knew that Ireland was too small to make a difference in any global conflict, they could not have known how powerful a super weapon Irish neutrality would become. It was only after the development of nuclear weapons that the true meaning of neutrality became clear. When the potential for total nuclear war came on the scene, Irish neutrality was upgraded from a strategically wise decision into a strategic super weapon.
Shadows of Iona
In 563 AD St Columba and twelve of his companions arrived on the small island of Iona, just off the Isle of Mull on the west coast of Scotland. St Columba and his merry band had come from Ireland, a country that had only recently begun the transition from paganism to Christianity, and their intention was to spread Christianity amongst the Picts and the Scots. In large part they were successful, but it is not this part of the story that is of interest for the question of Irish neutrality.
As time went on this tiny island became a hotbed of intellectual and cultural production. The monks on Iona recorded annals that are key to understanding early history in Ireland and other parts of the British Isles in this period. They also probably produced the Book of Kells, an incredible work of art. These developments happened against the backdrop of the Dark Ages when Europe became unstable amidst the fall of the Roman Empire. While the Dark Ages were far less dark than some make out, there is no doubt that civilization in this period was under threat from barbarians and Vikings. It was only thanks to monks in places like Iona that it survived. Monks on these remote islands copied key texts and in doing so preserved the Greco-Roman and early Christian tradition. It was only due to their work that we saw a flowering of Christian civilization in the Middle Ages.Today, with the development of nuclear weapons, the possibility is once more raised that civilization might be destroyed. In the event of a full-scale nuclear war, a good part of Europe, Eurasia and the Americas would likely be destroyed. It is fashionable today to think that a nuclear war would mean the extinction of humanity due to the potential for so-called ‘nuclear winter’, but these claims are likely overstated. There is no doubt that a full-scale nuclear war would cause severe short-term fluctuations in global weather, but historical precedent suggests that these would be survivable.
In 1816, for example, the world experienced severe short-term climate fluctuations that caused global temperatures to decrease by 0.4-0.7°C. This led to 1816 being popularly referred to as “The Year Without a Summer”. The most likely cause of The Year Without a Summer is the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies (modern-day Indonesia). This eruption was the largest in at least 1,300 years and caused what is known as a ‘volcanic winter’ which is very similar to the nuclear winter hypothesized to result from a full-scale nuclear war....
....MUCH MORE
HT: also P. Pilkington
