DF Commission Report

Anyone who uses % of GDP in Ireland's case knows exactly what they're doing.

About 90% of the claims relative to GDP are from Irish people criticising the government for "spending the lowest % of GDP on tiddlywinks in the EU" knowing full well that our outsized GDP makes everything small relative to it.

For the other 10% it's true that the rest of the world isn't reading CSO releases page to page, but anyone tuned in enough to be involving themselves in conversations on our defence spend would also be aware of our illusory GDP numbers. If they've managed to not be aware of the last 10 years of distorted GDP numbers, then their opinion is pretty badly informed and can be disregarded anyway.

Not that I don't think our defence spend is pathetic; it's simply a fact that % of GDP is worth nothing as a measurement in our case.

Ourselves and Luxembourg are out on our own. Nearly every other European country has a 1:1 match between GNI and GDP. Norway enjoys the opposite scenario; their GDP is undercounted.

That is falling into the trap of doing thigs to make the statistics look right. It reminds me of the time potential recruits in their 20s and older were refused entry in order to bring then average age of a private down!

So parts of Simons Radar to be in place next year. Good to see the interceptors are still on the table.

https://www.rte.ie/news/2025/0420/1508535-military-radar-system/

The big question is who is going to win the civil war between the 3 services ( an even 4th service Cyber if that actually happens) to operate the Radar Systems

Yeah, the contract might, just might be out by then, but given how little urgency anyone in the cabinet feels about defence that will be about it.

There are multiple big contracts in process with Thales, Indra and others, in Europe alone.

Ireland would potentially be one of many trying to get the same kit. The companies are big, but not that big.

A lot of the functions you mentioned could be done in parallel, but it's Ireland, so probably won't be.

I wouldn't agree with the "starting from scratch" statement… there are a number or primary radar trained ATCO's in Baldonnell, who would regularly work with their own S-band and AirNav Ireland L-band feeds. How they scale that is another matter….

If it were any other NATO nation, it would be the Air Corps leading, with Army and Naval interfaces….

Ireland don't have that either, or any trained function in the Navy/Army in anything ATC related. Only thing the Army has going for it is they have demonstrated scaling up ops on technical kit. Navy are a non-entity in this case IMO. A lot of the 3 forces aerial surveillance information is generated by Airnav Ireland or NATS anyway.

Thats a very telling word.

Seems pretty clear we are using the defence impetus exemptions from procurement to do yet another peer-to-peer acquisition. So its entirely possible the likes of France could ship existing Thales units in a relative short time.

Three Thales GroundMaster400(a) units, for example, could cover nearly 850,000 km² at surface up to a 3D altitude of 100,000 ft. And they cost only €30 million apiece for each 20ft module. Obviously ground works, hardened comms, systems integration, crewing and training will bring the price up to between 2 and 300 million, but the lead time is not terrible.

Thales Ground Master 400 Alpha unit.

6.09 x 2.89 metres.

And I’ll be more than happy to post about whatever we buy when we buy it. But the reality is simple and unavoidable, in terms of budget cycles we are now closer to 2028 than we are to 2022 when the Commission gave its findings, and we are barely started moving forward on long lead items to reach LoA2.

So how about instead of reading PR statements from the part time minister and making assumptions (let’s not forget how many times things like the MRV have been “talked about”), we wait until actual hardware orders are on the books rather than in the halls of the department being talked about.

i know with our past as a nation you have good reason to be pessimistic but how do you know the order is not already gone in and the system is been built as we speak? Not everything is shared in public straight away.

Because even with how quiet and "minor" the Government Jet and 145m buy was as soon as a contract happened it was in the public domain. Whatever about the government trying to keep things quiet, the company that gets it won't, at the very least they would be highlighting that they have a new customer even if they didn't mention us, for example knds was more than happy to say we were talking to them even though it wasn't public from our side. And as I said, if Estonian ordered in '23 and are still waiting then realistically even if you were right we would be lucky to get a unit by '28 at this stage.

I'm not saying that its gone the way of the MRV and will be reduced to a running gag by multiple governments, I think the basic buy will happen at some stage, but I'm going to be pessimistic right up until we have a contract signed, ideally with massive penalty clauses if we try backing out. I'm also going to say that at this stage even with literally every other rumour actually happening (which I doubt) we are still going to miss the LoA2 targets by 2028 at this stage in budgets, hardware and people.

Indra have a very, very dodgy company history. I'm not saying that all big defence conglomerates aren't inclined to get down and dirty in the rat's nest, but I wouldn't like to see our tax euros go to Indra.

Ethical military equipment suppliers is an oxymoron…. only difference with Indra is, they were caught.

From an equipment perspective, the Lanza is quite capable, and definitely isn't the worst out there for the price.

Going by PBP and there pals numbers in the current dail and local elections i dont think there stance is carried by the general irish public.