Is Irish sovereignty restricted by the provision of the ‘triple lock’, which requires United Nations approval before more than a dozen Irish troops are deployed on peace-keeping missions abroad, and the Veto system which may prevent such approval being given by the Security Council?  (There are five members of the Security Council which have a Veto power:  China, France, Russia, UK, and US.)

The fact is that, while the Superpowers have a special role in troop deployments, the General Assembly is not powerless in the matter.  There is nothing to prevent it authorising such a deployment by a simple majority vote.

The Veto Power of the ‘Big Five’  is the ground on which the Government is advocating the removal of the Triple Lock on Irish troop deployments.

The Chairman of the Peace And Neutrality Alliance, Stephen Kelly, has issued a letter in which it is argued that the Triple Lock, far from being a restriction on Sovereignty, is an exercise of Sovereignty:

“The Peace and Neutrality Alliance (PANA) rejects recent comments made by Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill regarding Irish sovereignty being somehow constrained by the triple lock (“Michael Collins’s legacy honoured by sending Irish troops on peacekeeping missions, says Carroll MacNeill,” News, August 24th).

The triple lock does indeed require that Irish troop deployments have a United Nations mandate, but Article 25 of the United Nations Charter requires us as a member state to adhere to decisions of the UN Security Council and respect their binding nature in any event.  Why is the Minister not advocating departure from the UN?

The triple lock is an exercise in sovereignty and, in particular, popular sovereignty.  It is the Irish people who, in two referendums in 2002 and 2009, endorsed the triple lock.  Unlike Britain, in Ireland sovereignty resides in the people not parliament.  (Letter, Irish Times, 28.8.25.)

The Veto on the Security Council is essential to the existence of the United Nations, and it is not a restriction on Irish Sovereignty.  The requirement of Security Council approval of Irish military deployment is domestically imposed on the Government.  At present it thwarts the Government wish to engage in military adventures.  It was established as a safeguard that shielded the Government from external pressure to engage in military adventures.

If this Government wants to be freed from it, that can be achieved much more easily than by undermining the United Nations.

It can go to the country on the issue of repealing the third lock, which elected representatives agreed upon in more confident times.

The United Nations is a power structure.  It was established by the Powers that won the Second World War.

Whatever be the merits of that War, brought about by Britain—whether Germany had changed from being a guardian of Western Civilisation, when Britain dismantled Czechoslovakia for it in the Fall of 1938, and had become a force destructive of civilisation in the Spring of 1939 when Britain decided to make make war on it—the matter passed out of British hands in June 1940, and passed into Russian and American hands in 1941.

Russia and America represented fundamentally different, and antagonistic, forms of civilisation.  Neither had entered the War voluntarily—but they ended up as masters of the world.  Instead of beginning a Third World War to decide which would be complete master—as Britain would have done if it still had the power—they decided to divide the world between them, and establish a world organisation to maintain a kind of order based on the legitimacy of each.  The Vetoes they gave each other on the Security Council guarded them against each other within the UN system.  General Assembly majorities were denied the authority to make War on behalf of the UN.

The system worked well enough until ideologues in command of the Russian State imagined that they were all-powerful and could transform the system which had defeated Nazi Germany into the Western system, which had given way to it at every turn.  

Russia tried to join the West and was repulsed, sending its own social structure into meltdown.  It suspended use of its Veto, allowing the West to engage in capricious destruction of viable States in the name of “the rules based order”, with chaos as the outcome.

The “the rules based order”, while it existed, was a stand-off between the two Super-Powers.  In US foreign policy it was called the doctrine of “containment”, but it worked both ways.  Each ‘contained’ the other.  When Russia, in a fit of groundless idealism, dissolved itself as a Super-Power, the US did not quite know what to do, except to have its own way on everything.  John Bolton (a former Trump security adviser, who fell out with the President and had his house searched!) when in the ascendant, gave a brutal description of how the US intimidated small states, taking their turn on the Security Council, into not offering even token opposition to US initiatives.

The Trump Government simply ignores the UN—treats it as not existing.  And it openly threatens “international law” not to interfere with its affairs.  And it has openly treated the  UN Genocide Convention as a dead letter by authorising, and enabling, (televised) destruction of the native population of Gaza by the Jewish State.  The thing that “must never happen again” is being restored to normality.

It might be that the Gaza atrocities are not the worst things, in absolute terms, going on in the world.  But they are the most noticeable.  The slaughter of Jews in Europe in 1941-4 was called Genocide and branded as infamous.  Now it is the Jewish nation that is slaughtering the population of Gaza—and international law is calling it Genocide.

International Law does not understand that the Jewish nation lives within the horizons of its own civilisation, which has resisted inclusion in other civilisations for thousands of years, whilst living within them.  Ben Gurion tried to explain the Jewish mind-set, but was not understood (see Church & State No. 159, Winter 2025 re. his Address to Anglo/American Committee in 1947).

Holocaust is what is done TO Jews.  It cannot be what Jews DO!  

That is the Jewish nationalist case.  It has not been concealed.  But it just seemed too outlandish for the Gentiles who constructed the United Nations system to grasp.

Britain, the real founder of the Jewish State, understood it well enough, and does its best to remain silent while Jewish nationalists slaughter a people standing in their way.  And the United States positively approves!

But South Africa decided to put the apparatus of law—spun around the United Nations—to the test by bringing a case against Israel to the United Nations Court.  The US has punished South Africa for its disobedience by accusing it of Genocide against the master race which it is freeing itself from.  But the International Court took the case, and is making something of it.

The best that can be hoped for with regard to the Security Council is that the Veto system should be restored as the legitimising authority in the division of the world into fundamentally different systems of life.  A restoration of what was called The Cold War.  That system gave individual States some leverage, by enabling them to play one Great Power against the other.  And the Great Powers had an interest in keeping their retinue within bounds:  for fear of making the other Bloc look good by comparison!

Human nature is not the kind of thing capable of maintaining a harmonious world republic.