29/10/2026
The Minister for Defence and Foreign Affairs, Helen McEntee, has once again proclaimed that protecting the network of subsea cables off the Irish coast is "the central pillar of Ireland's national security." Speaking at a subsea cable security symposium recently, McEntee waxed lyrical about the invisible backbone of our digital economy—those fibre-optic cables carrying "every email sent, every video call made, every financial transaction processed."
What was conspicuously absent was any evidence that these cables face a credible, deliberate threat from a hostile state actor.
Instead, we were treated to the usual rogues' gallery of vague menaces: "cyber attacks, hybrid threats and geopolitical tensions." These are the weasel words of the securitisation industry—terms so elastic they can stretch to justify virtually any military expenditure, any erosion of neutrality, any entanglement with a euro-atlantic confrontational posture.
Remember the Yantar, a Russian research vessel that was tracked within 60km of the east coast of Ireland in November 2024. The Minister's allies in Western intelligence insisted it was a spy ship. The Irish Navy, alongside US and UK military hardware, dutifully monitored its movements.
And what did this fearsome vessel actually do?
The answer was nothing. It sailed within 60km of our coast—international waters, let us remember—and then sailed away. No cables were cut. No sabotage occurred. No "hybrid attack" materialised. The entire episode amounted to nothing more than the fact that a Russian ship exists. From this, we are supposed to conclude that Ireland must abandon its neutrality and integrate into EU and NATO military structures. An example of threat inflation of the most cynical order.
For years, Western officials pointed to the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage as definitive proof of Russian aggression against critical undersea infrastructure. Yet German criminal proceedings have implicated Ukraine as the origin of the operation. Whether or not one accepts their outcome, the crucial point remains: the most significant act of undersea infrastructure sabotage in European history was not the work of the regular Russian villains of Brussels’ obsessions.
This fact fatally undermines the premise that a hostile foreign power is systematically targeting critical infrastructure in European waters. The Minister for Defence and Foreign Affairs would do well to acknowledge it. She will not, of course—because inconvenient facts have no place in the construction of a moral panic.
What does actually threaten Ireland's subsea cables? The answer is almost unbearably mundane: fishing nets, ship anchors, poor weather, and human error. Accidental damage accounts for the vast majority of cable outages worldwide. These are engineering problems, requiring engineering solutions—redundancy, rapid repair capacity, better seabed mapping.
But you cannot justify a €1.7 billion military capital plan—complete with Thales sonar systems and EU PESCO integration—by saying "we need to fix anchors." You need a villain. You need a spy ship. You need "hybrid threats" and "geopolitical tensions" and all the other vacuous jargon that transforms routine infrastructure maintenance into a crusade against the Kremlin.
But there is another uncomfortable truth Minister McEntee would rather ignore: Ireland's most effective maritime security asset is already afloat, and it does not require a single additional euro of military spending.
When Russian naval exercises were proposed off the Irish coast in 2022, it was not the Naval Service or US intelligence that turned the tide—it was fishermen. Their presence, their vigilance, their simple presence on the water proved a more effective deterrent than any warship. Yet the same government that now warns of spy ships has spent years strangling the fishing industry with quotas, fuel costs, and bureaucratic neglect.
Imagine a maritime security strategy that invested in fuel subsidies for trawlers, modernised the fleet, and recognised fishermen as the "eyes on the water" they have always been. Imagine treating security as a civilian, community-led endeavour rather than a playground for defence contractors.
Who owns these subsea cables? They are not public assets. They are not strategic national infrastructure in the sense of roads or hospitals. The vast majority are owned by multinational technology corporations—Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon—generating enormous profits from global data flows.
Why should the Irish taxpayer bear the cost of protecting private infrastructure? Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the legal framework is at best ambiguous about the state's responsibility here. What is unambiguous is that these corporations have balance sheets that could easily fund their own security arrangements—including rapid repair vessels, seabed monitoring, and redundancy planning.
Instead, the Irish government proposes to militarise the seabed on their behalf. This is corporate welfare disguised as national security.
The current National Maritime Security Strategy is not really about cables at all. It is about manufacturing consent for the abandonment of Irish neutrality.
The pressure to align with Brussels' common defence ambitions is the backdrop to all these developments. The submarine cable narrative is perfectly suited to serve this political project: it is technical enough to discourage public scrutiny, vague enough to permit endless escalation, and frightening enough to override reflexive opposition to militarisation.
The Minister tells us these cables are "increasingly exposed." Exposed to what, precisely? Not to evidence-based threats. Not to a single documented act of state-sponsored cable sabotage in Irish waters. Exposed, instead, to a political class that has decided neutrality is an inconvenience to be discarded.
The Government insists that risks are "evolving, persistent and demand a coordinated response." Coordination does not mean capitulation to NATO. It does not mean PESCO projects that bind Ireland to EU military structures. And it certainly does not mean spending €1.7 billion on unproven surveillance technology while the fishing fleet rots.
If the Minister is sincere about protecting subsea cables—rather than using them as a pretext for geopolitical realignment—she will adopt the following measures:
First, publish the evidence. Any claim of "malicious intent" against Irish subsea infrastructure must be accompanied by declassified intelligence, incident reports, and a transparent accounting of what exactly has been observed in Irish waters.
Second, conduct a Neutrality Impact Assessment for every proposed military procurement and international partnership. Before Ireland commits another euro to EU PESCO projects or NATO's Partnership for Peace, the Oireachtas must evaluate whether these commitments are compatible with a sovereign, non-aligned foreign policy.
Third, prioritise civilian resilience over military hardware. Invest in rapid repair vessels—which experts agree do more for energy and data security than any sonar array. Fund seabed mapping and cable burial. Mandate redundancy requirements for private cable operators.
Fourth, stop subsidising multinational corporations. Require tech giants to bear the primary cost of protecting their own infrastructure, whether through direct expenditure or a dedicated levy.
Fifth, support the fishing fleet. Fuel subsidies, quota reform, and fleet modernisation would put eyes on the water at a fraction of the cost of naval expansion. This is not a sentimental appeal to tradition—it is a hard-headed assessment of where Ireland gets the most maritime security per euro spent.
The Minister recently proclaimed that "the protection of critical undersea infrastructure is now a central pillar of Ireland's national security." She is wrong. Or rather, she is making it so—by choice, not by necessity. The real central pillar of Irish national security has always been sovereignty: the capacity to chart an independent course in a dangerous world. That sovereignty is now under assault not from Russian spy ships, but from domestic political elites who have convinced themselves that neutrality is an embarrassment to be shed.
We face a choice. We can continue down the path of threat inflation, war hysteria, and the slow strangulation of Irish neutrality—all in the name of protecting private data cables owned by Silicon Valley billionaires.Or we can recognise the subsea cable "crisis" for what it is: a solution in search of a problem, driven by geopolitical objectives that do not serve the interests of the Irish people.
