Ireland's Inability to Defend Itself

No offense but how is that not obvious by second grade. Don't have a big mouth if you don't have a big stick too. Ireland doesn't have quiet opinions, but a rather big mouth about other nations' foreign policy.

Ireland have an army with no tanks and an air force with no jets.

How would they maintain peace in another country without the help of others

OK so their capability isn't precisely 0, but it rounds to 0.

Their "peacekeeping" missions are somewhere between utterly impotent / useless and actively counterproductive. Playing dumb and doing nothing while Hezbollah uses you as cover to launch missiles over the border from a couple hundred meters away is not keeping the peace.

Assuming you’re not just some Russian bot, which countries embrace the return of deserters?

Ireland chose to take a position against colonialism, after having experienced the warm embrace of the British Empire, ethnic cleansing and oppression for centuries.

Notably thousands of Irish soldiers did fight the Germans in WW2 but via joining the British Army... an act that was frowned upon at the times. Many were killed.

There's also a long history of tragic events happening precisely because everyone was preparing for them (see: WWI) and of course, of horribly wrong choices getting prepared for things that never happened.

The Irish were idiots for sending peacekeepers there without adequate air, armor, and artillery support.

That's laudable, but it doesn't change the fact that they rely on their European neighbors to defend them while feigning "neutrality" and wouldn't return the favor if another, say, EU country were seriously attacked.

There's a similar population ratio between the PRC and Taiwan I believe, so I guess Taiwan should just give up on having a military entirely then?

Not possible for them to stop China, so why bother? Just lie back and think of Ireland.

What? The very distance involved and difficulty of such an invasion is precisely why resistance is extremely plausible and not being able to do so is indefensible. Even a "token" amount of resistance makes it exponentially more difficult.

You would certainly have been the type of person whining about how Ukraine was doomed to fall in a matter of hours under the incredible size and capability of the Russian military. Like, these guys are just not that competent. You can make the job nearly impossible for them by just giving a single solitary fuck.

To say nothing of the fact that "full invasion" isn't even really the target. They just need to be able to defend their own airspace and sea lanes against errant Russian planes and ships.

I assume you're referring to the 1952 agreement that the RAF is allowed to intercept unidentified or hostile aircraft in Irish airspace?

That's because the UK does not want Ireland to have an army. Ireland has a long history of standing with Native Americans, Palestinians, and other groups facing colonization. They even have a military base in Lebanon and a very long standing partnership with Hezbollah (Hezbollah was born out of the struggle to take back the bottom third of their country that was occupied by the US and Israel so they are often seen as an anti-colonial movement).

Ireland having any sort of military capacities would directly contradict UK military interests.

Canada is in a similar situation. A lot of high-minded talk about peacekeeping and neutrality, but constantly benefitting from being implicitly protected by US defence policy. The real test will come if/when Russia decides to challenge Canadian arctic sovereignty.

> It's a bit like if Kansas refused to pay anything towards the defense budget because any hostile powers would have to go through all those other states first

That's Spain's current position in NATO.

The Russians have actively sabotaged undersea cables belonging or connecting to NATO countries. What have they done about it?

In general, states like Kansas are dependent on Federal money anyway, so they they don’t really contribute much. 10 states basically support the Federal government from a tax perspective.

Kansas would probably spend very little on defense, if it was a sovereign state.

Defense spending is not virtue signaling. It's money countries may have to waste if they feel threatened. But if there are no credible threats, it's better to lower the taxes or to spend the money on something that actually benefits the citizens.

The UK already occupied the north of Ireland.

Um.

See Irish history vs. the UK.

given Britain's entire history wrt Ireland, I'd say defending Ireland is the least they could do.