Ireland the proverbial gnat in the battle of political elephants
World of Politics with Harry McGee – [email protected]
The Russian ambassador to Ireland Yuri Filatov has been quite active in recent days, appearing frequently on media – and he’s not short of a word or two to the wise.
“It’s a real world. Every government is well within its own right to take actions, whichever it might want to do,” he told RTÉ’s Claire Byrne Show.
“But, my point and my concern is, whatever happens tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, we should be concerned about the best interests of the Irish public, and the best interests of the Russian public – the Irish-Russian relationship.”
He knew at the time he said that on Monday night that the expulsion of a Russian diplomat was inevitable, and we can expect Russia to reciprocate in kind.
But still he played it up. In reality, its impact will be really minor. About as painful to Russia as a gnat’s bite is to the hide of an elephant.
Or put another way, it’s like getting the black card in the GAA. One of your players has to leave the field but it’s a zero sum game as there is always a replacement.
And then on Tuesday, a little over twelve hours later, Ireland announced it was expelling a diplomat.
It wasn’t exactly brinkmanship. On Monday, over 100 diplomats had been expelled from the US, from Australia and from 16 EU countries. Ireland adding an additional diplomat to that pile was hardly going to be a back-breaker.
Monday saw a really impressive global response to the nerve-agent attack in Salisbury on the Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.
My own sense of it was the Government was caught on the hop on Monday and came a little late to the game.
The security assessment that was ordered by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar last week had not yet been completed in time for the coordinated action that was taken by others on Monday. Perhaps the Government felt more comfortable to ensure the decision had the imprimatur of Cabinet on Tuesday, even though that was not strictly necessary.
So given what happened everywhere else on Monday, anything short of expulsion would not have washed and would send out very poor signals about Ireland’s solidarity with our nearest neighbour.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.