When Donald Tusk tweeted on Monday that 14 EU states had announced expulsions, there were some who suggested the Government might have missed a trick. But that was not quite so.
While Leo Varadkar was an “early adopter” in the expulsion debate, the Irish Government had always insisted whatever decision it made would have be based on its own assessment. And that simply had not fully concluded by Monday.
Besides because of the “no surprises” clause in the Confidence and Supply Agreement, there was also a need to square the action with Fianna Fáil in advance of the announcement.
There was also another layer to the Government’s process that differentiated it from many other EU states. Many of those had taken the decision to expel for political reasons, namely to express solidarity with the UK. There was an element of that in the Irish response, but there was also another dimension; and that was a security assessment on Russian activities in Ireland based on briefings from Garda and Army intelligence.
Tánaiste Simon Coveney gave unequivocal support to the UK assessment that the nerve agent was of a type developed by Russia and that gave rise to only two plausible explanations: it was a direct act by the Russian state against the United Kingdom or the Russian government had lost control of this deadly nerve agent.
But the key paragraph in his speech to the Dáil last night was the one in which he said that factors internal to this jurisdiction also played a part in the decision.
National security
“I would emphasise that the decision was not just based on political and diplomatic factors. I want to make clear that the assessment included the full range of factors, including our own national security, and relied on the advice of those with the greatest relevant expertise in each area.”
A high-level group had been set up to conduct the assessment led by the Department of Foreign Affairs and included senior figures from justice, the Garda and the Defence Forces. They met regularly since last Thursday and gave a detailed briefing to Coveney on Sunday night, just before his departure for Government business in Sweden on Monday. The thrust of it was that there were national security issues that pertained to the Russian embassy in Dublin.
It is no surprise at all that the Russian diplomatic corps in Dublin might contain some members of the FSB, the security and intelligence service that is a successor to the KGB. Most other major powers with presence in Dublin would include some “spies” in their ranks. The assessment of the domestic intelligence units within the Garda and the Army would rely on “intel” from colleagues in the UK, the EU and the US in relation to Russian officials based here.
Abstract vs hard facts
How much information will the Government share with the Opposition? Most senior Opposition figures from Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald, to Labour’s Brendan Howlin to Catherine Murphy of the Social Democrats and leftists Richard Boyd-Barrett and Paul Murphy demanded evidence from the Government to back up its expulsion. That is a tricky proposition, as it is a highly secretive world and the evidence is abstract, based on assessment and supposition as much as hard facts.
The Russian ambassador Yuri Filatov described the expulsions as unwarranted and senseless. His main assertion was that Russian officials in Ireland had done nothing wrong or illegal.
The Russian official, as yet unnamed, has been given nine days to leave the country. Filatov’s comment on this move was: “Everybody understands the absurdity of the situation yet nonetheless the political theatre goes on.”
And of course, the next act in the political theatre will be a reciprocal expulsion of an Irish diplomat from Moscow in the coming weeks.
