THE forth­com­ing Budget will unveil a fin­an­cial pack­age in the region of €8.5bil­lion com­pris­ing a mix of increased spend­ing and reduced tax­a­tion. There will be de facto cost-of-liv­ing sup­ports and much talk of Ire­land’s sus­tain­able approach to fin­an­cing.

There will also be – of course – numer­ous min­is­ters in front of the cam­eras con­grat­u­lat­ing them­selves on their fin­an­cial foresight.

What there won’t be is a ser­i­ous defence budget.

Between 2016 and 2026, total Gov­ern­ment spend­ing has increased by a whop­ping 96 per cent, to more than €130bil­lion a year. Yet, of this massive splurge, only €1.5bil­lion – about one per cent – related to defence in 2026. This should really embar­rass us. In Brus­sels, we’ve become used to win­cing at the fig­ures. Ire­land spends around 0.2 per cent of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) on defence, the low­est in the European Union and roughly eight times below the EU aver­age.

Even on the more flat­ter­ing GNI (Gross National Income) meas­ure (which excludes mul­tina­tional dis­tor­tions), we man­age about 0.4 per cent. Aus­tria, the neut­ral­ity model our own pur­ists invoke, spends about three times more.

Min­is­ters will call this year’s €1.5bil­lion a ‘record’. Of course it is. Any­one start­ing from noth­ing has nowhere to go but up.

To main­tain a basic capa­city to patrol and pro­tect our bor­ders, Ire­land needs an annual defence budget of at least €3bil­lion.

We’re not talk­ing Top Gun cap­ab­il­it­ies here, simply an abil­ity to track, engage and – where required – inter­cept uniden­ti­fied or hos­tile act­ors.

And it’s non­sense to say we can’t afford it, when €3bil­lion a year accounts for about two per cent of total Gov­ern­ment spend­ing in 2026 and just more than 10 per cent of our social pro­tec­tion expendit­ures.

So what should the Budget con­tain to make Ire­land a cred­ible defence actor? Start with these five things.

First, a multi-annual, ring-fenced envel­ope for both cur­rent and cap­ital spend­ing. Not an annual alloc­a­tion that can be quietly clawed back. Ire­land needs to plan its defence needs over dec­ades, not years. Only then can real cer­tainty be given regard­ing staff­ing and equip­ment needs.

Second, a plan. Ire­land’s last White Paper on Defence is more than a dec­ade old. A National Secur­ity Strategy, begun in 2019, remains unpub­lished. There is no co-ordin­ated acquis­i­tion strategy for mil­it­ary hard­ware.

Dub­lin’s use of gov­ern­ment-to -gov­ern­ment deals to buy more than €1bil­lion worth of mil­it­ary equip­ment from France is being done without open tenders or com­pet­it­ive offers.

Ire­land has also chosen to ignore the cata­strophic fin­an­cial value in these types of deals. Just ask poor Bel­gium, which remains locked into a deal with France for dec­ades to come. Panic-driven order­ing is a recipe for poor value and even worse oper­a­tional out­comes.

Third: think smarter, not just big­ger. It isn’t all about jets and tanks. Paddy McGuin­ness, a former UK deputy national secur­ity adviser, recently said that ‘late entrants often have an advant­age over pion­eers. They don’t have to inherit yes­ter­day’s tech­no­logy’.

Ire­land is the ulti­mate late entrant, so we should use this to our advant­age.

Sol­diers guard­ing the EU pres­id­ency are being issued shot­guns as a last resort against drones, and a €19mil­lion jam­ming sys­tem will struggle against fibre-optic and AI-guided mod­els.

Budget 2027 should start to fund real counter-drone defence. It should provide an ini­tial cash alloc­a­tion to buy sur­veil­lance we can actu­ally crew: that is, per­sist­ent drones watch­ing vital under­sea cables and shad­ow­ing poten­tially hos­tile ships around the clock.

Fourth, build a coher­ent cyber strategy. The attack on the HSE in 2021 should have been a wake-up call. It wasn’t.

Our national strategy was writ­ten for 2019 to 2024 and the Defence Forces them­selves admit ‘lim­ited resources’ in cyber threat intel­li­gence. The Joint Cyber Defence Com­mand needs to be prop­erly staffed and fun­ded by well-trained experts.

Fifth, geo­graphy over sen­ti­ment. We already depend on Brit­ish jets to respond to threats in our air­space (with Dub­lin’s approval). This is depend­ence on the cheap.

In March, Dub­lin and Lon­don agreed to refresh their defence memor­andum. Now it’s time for Ire­land to fully embrace its respons­ib­il­it­ies – just as nation states are sup­posed to do.

Joint respons­ib­il­ity for air poli­cing and mari­time sur­veil­lance and Irish money for the cap­ab­il­it­ies we should be bring­ing ourselves.

No Brit­ish bases. No Nato. No for­eign adven­tures. Just cred­ible secur­ity in Irish waters and skies.

The logic is hard to argue with. Bri­tain has the fight­ers, frig­ates and satel­lites. France and Ger­many lack the prox­im­ity to scramble from air­fields next door.

Bel­gium and the Neth­er­lands share naval forces without a con­sti­tu­tional crisis. A struc­tured part­ner­ship would also bind Lon­don closer to European secur­ity, which is what Brus­sels wants.

The 1916 bri­gade will call all of this treason. They dream of West­ern prosper­ity without West­ern secur­ity oblig­a­tions. That isn’t neut­ral­ity. It’s free-load­ing with a flag. Because real cred­ib­il­ity is not declared in a com­mu­niqué. It is budgeted, crewed and delivered.

On Tues­day, we find out if Ire­land wants to be a ser­i­ous coun­try when it comes to secur­ity and defence. I think we all already know the answer.

*Published by The Irish Mail on Sunday on 4 October 2026