The UK had to come to Ireland's aid as a Russian submarine was 'hovering' 12 miles from Cork harbour

You have just completed the Gammon armchair general bingo card:

blame SF check

Ireland is ruled by the EU check

EU worse since UK left (good riddance) check

Britain bailed out Ireland check

Anything else?

Something about the Pope or how Churchill killed Hitler?

I’m no fan of Russia, but to believe they are responsible for uncontrolled illegal immigration (from many British commonwealth and French colonies) is pure propaganda

Again, they are not “fighting for us”. They are looking after their own interests. If it wasn’t in their interests they’d leave the Russians to enter Irish airspace and waters and wouldn’t give a fook about us.

They aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, as some seem to believe.

So we should be actually be doing for our own interests

Would you be happy for Russia to have free reign in our waters and airspace, and for us not to spend money defending them, purely because we have nothing to interest them ?

Two claims were made - first, that the Brits are 'defending' us, and second that the Russians could invade at any time.

Now the first is plainly nonsense - the Brits treat us like we've still part of their empire, and the fact that our government acquiesces sort of encourages them in their views. I think most people with an interest in the matter were horrified to find out that our government has various 'understandings' with the UK (military overflight and the like), the US (informal use of Shannon as a base) etc on military matters that have never been explicitly approved by the Dáil.

On the second matter, just how would the Russians take us by surprise? Do you think they might dig a tunnel from Russia to Ireland to infiltrate us? Because any other method would not be a surprise - they would need either a flotilla full of soldiers and equipment or an enormous wave of aircraft filled with the same.

And in either case, it would be sort of obvious that something was up. Blocking the runways of our airports would stymie the air invasion (obviously not paratroopers) so the flotilla would be their better option, albeit less likely to go unnoticed. Even at that, huge waves of aircraft flying out of Murmansk, all the way around Norway and then across the North Sea and around Scotland would be hard to miss. And all of this by a state that is hard put to hold the land they seized in Ukraine and is unable to keep their Syrian safe from constant air attacks by Israel.

I've answered the bit about the contrails in another post: nobody in Europe is going to allow Russia to overfly them in order to invade Ireland - the sheer volume of planes required to carry the equipment and troops required is mind-boggling when all we would have to do is block the runways of our airports to keep them from landing.

You're expecting the UK to invade? And make themselves complete international pariahs and have themselves booted out of NATO for no particular reason? What an utterly ridiculous notion. Given the opportunity they'd quite gladly offload Northern Ireland, there is absolutely no possible reason for them to ever consider invading. And lets imagine the utterly absurd scenario that they did. If we doubled, tripled, quadrupled our military spending, what would that achieve? There is no possible world where we would outspend the entire United Kingdom, particularly one that had turned so utterly insanely authoritarian and militaristic that is has completely lost its mind and started invading friendly neighbouring countries.

So increasing our military budget to prepare for this preposterous situation would achieve nothing other than more bloodshed on the way to the inevitable conclusion. The only possible end to this insanely unlikely hypothetical (ignoring the probability of the US and EU getting involved to put a stop to this rogue UK state before it got started) would be a British military victory, followed by a failed occupation and eventual political solution. The size of any Irish armed force at the beginning of the conflict would be pretty irrelevant.