Enterprise Ireland e IDA hanno ottenuto l’autorizzazione a sostenere le aziende del settore della difesa

Bit of an aside to the story but for those of us advocating for a United Ireland, this is welcome news. 

Belfast has quite a developed defence industry and its a common riposte for better informed Unionists in debates- what’ll happen to those jobs? 

Now, can we please sort out ISAs etc?

All round good news but with some things to keep an eye on.

The Irish defence forces will never be a huge structure, even in a war ready state and there’s only so many companies that would be able to say they can survive on the Irish DF sales alone.

I’d implore any startup in this area to never second guess your customers. If things seem too good to be true, they probably are, and it’d be horrible that anything from state supported Irish defence companies ended up in the hands of terrorist organisations or armies that are engaging in war crimes, like Russia, Israel and the United States. It just so happens it’s these 3 have all the money in the world to spend on what we might be selling.

If you can’t sell it in Ireland, sell to the EU. If you can’t sell it to the EU, sell to Ukraine, Britain, Norway, Turkiye and Canada. After that, just don’t sell it. the geopolitical picture is too murky and there’s no one coming to rescue us except the places I’ve listed and even then we don’t have a sheet of paper with any of those places to say that they would for definite.

The gulf market will be busy but you’re never going to be certain that if you sell arms to the UAE that they won’t end up slaughtering people in Sudan, same goes for arm sales to Saudi, Syria etc.

I expect Paul Murphy and Catherine Connolly to decry this as warmongering.