Ireland took over the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union on 1 July, and its first order of business was making sure someone else's air force was watching the sky over Dublin.
For the next six months the Irish government will chair negotiations among the EU's 27 member states, set the agenda for ministerial meetings and broker the compromises that turn Commission proposals into law. It is Ireland's eighth turn in the chair, run under the Irish-language slogan "Ní neart go cur le chéile" — "Strength with unity" — with three declared priorities: competitiveness, European values and security. On that last one, the country now steering the bloc is its weakest link.
Ireland spends around €1.2 billion a year on defence, about 0.2% of GDP. That is the lowest share in the European Union, against a bloc average well above 1%. It is the only member state with no primary radar. It has no sonar, no dedicated counter-drone detection, and no reliable way to monitor the airspace over its own capital and main airport. For a presidency that will host more than 20 high-level meetings and a steady rotation of prime ministers and commissioners, that gap is not academic.
So Dublin has leaned on its neighbours. A French air-defence warship has been operating off Dublin Bay, at the edge of Irish territorial waters, and a French frigate is expected to call at Dublin later in the term. France has also sent a detachment kitted out for counter-drone work — a light helicopter with electro-optical sensors and marksmen carrying signal-jamming rifles. Irish troops, for their part, have been trained to shoot drones out of the sky with shotguns, a tactic borrowed from Ukraine's front line. Between them, French and British forces will help keep visiting leaders safe from threats in the air and at sea.
The arrangement is legally and politically fraught in a country where neutrality is treated as a national principle. The government sought formal legal advice on whether foreign forces can lawfully operate on Irish soil and in Irish waters, and on the rules of engagement if they judge a threat is real. The worry is concrete: during a visit by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his wife last December, unidentified drones tailed the president, and officials later conceded they did not know who was controlling them or why. Because roughly three-quarters of the Northern Hemisphere's subsea data cables pass close to Irish waters, the surveillance gap is a European vulnerability, not just an Irish one.
The drones grab attention, but the presidency will be measured on money and enlargement. The hardest file is the Multiannual Financial Framework, the EU's next seven-year budget. Ireland must referee a fight between net contributors pressing for cuts — Germany among the loudest — and governments defending farm payments and cohesion funds. Dublin is not a neutral broker here: the same budget could squeeze the Common Agricultural Policy that underpins Irish farming and reopen pressure on Ireland's low corporate-tax model.
On Russia and Ukraine, Ireland wants to land a 21st sanctions package by the end of July and to open new chapters in Ukraine's membership talks. Enlargement runs through the whole agenda: Brussels has just set out the budget terms for Montenegro, the frontrunner among candidate countries, and Dublin has signalled it wants to keep that process moving. Its security programme is heavily domestic-facing too — cross-border policing against organised crime, migrant smuggling and firearms trafficking, and shoring up the resilience of Europe's ports and critical infrastructure.
Not everyone reads Ireland's Brussels-friendly reputation as an asset. In a briefing published as the presidency began, the think tank MCC Brussels argued that Ireland is the EU's "model member state" in the least flattering sense — a government so eager to please the Commission that it repeatedly puts Brussels' priorities ahead of its own citizens'. The briefing warned that Dublin would use the chair to push an agenda on speech regulation, digital-identity age checks for social media and NGO funding while Europe's competitiveness problem goes unaddressed. "The greatest danger isn't that Ireland will make headlines. It's that it won't," said the group's John O'Brien, pointing to the working groups and closed-door trilogues where most EU law is quietly written.
There is a second awkwardness. Ireland is home to the European headquarters of most of the world's largest technology companies, and its regulators sit at the heart of EU enforcement against them. Critics point to the revolving door between those watchdogs and the industry they oversee, which muddies Dublin's claim to be a tough referee of Big Tech at the very moment digital rules dominate the European agenda. Ireland's answer is that it now polices technology far more strictly than its old light-touch image implies.
Ireland's presidency captures the EU's central contradiction in a single image. The bloc talks endlessly about security, sovereignty and rearmament — yet the country now running its day-to-day business cannot defend its own airspace and has to borrow French and British hardware just to host a summit safely. That is not a purely Irish failing; Austria, Malta and Cyprus are also outside NATO. But it is a vivid one, and it will hang over every debate Ireland chairs on defence spending and strategic autonomy.
The bigger story is quieter. Whoever holds the chair sets the tempo of the budget fight and the enlargement timetable, and Ireland's instinct for consensus is about to be tested against hard national interests — its farmers, its tax base, its neutrality. Steer a workable seven-year budget, keep Ukraine's accession alive and get through six months without an incident over Dublin, and Ireland will have earned its slogan. Fall short, and the defining image will be the one from week one: a small, wealthy, undefended country steering a continent that is spending fortunes to arm itself.
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