Bertie Ahern wants to keep the Triple Lock Micheál Martin wants to abolish

Media/Political Statement, Monday 3 November 2025

Did Taoiseach Micheál Martin consult his Fianna Fáil colleagues when he adopted Fine Gael’s policy of abolishing the Triple Lock  – which he once described as “the core of Irish neutrality”?  Did he consider the views of  Fianna Fáil members and supporters when he decided to abandon a central value of the party’s founder, Éamon de Valera: a meaningful neutrality policy – something fundamental to Fianna Fáil’s most progressive traditions?  

Was Jim Gavin nominated for the presidency to give Micheál Martin cover for his Triple Lock volte-face – an ex-Army man who hastened to proclaim his support for ending the Triple Lock the moment he announced his candidature?

It is good to learn that former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern wants to keep the Triple Lock that Micheál Martin wants to abolish.   Sometime last year I sent Mr Ahern material defending the Triple Lock, and to my surprise he came to my door in Drumcondra coming up to last year’s General Election – something he had never done before – to thank me for what I had sent him and to say that he did not agree with the Government’s policy of seeking the Triple Lock’s abolition.

It was the Bertie Ahern Government in 2002 which inserted the commitment to keep the Triple Lock – without time limit – in the “National Declaration” on neutrality that it issued in the second Nice Treaty referendum to persuade those who had voted No in Nice One out of concern for neutrality to change their vote and permit that Treaty’s ratification in Nice Two.

That National Declaration by Ireland was responded to by the other EU Member States in the 2002 Seville Declaration, and those two Declarations were formally registered at the UN along with the Nice Treaty when that was registered there. All parties in the Oireachtas parties supported it at the time.

No Irish Government before or since has issued a comparable National Declaration on any other matter.  This gives a quasi-constitutional status to the Triple Lock commitment, which the Supreme Court will surely uphold if an abolition Bill should come before it.

Ireland’s statutory Referendum Commission mentioned  this Triple Lock commitment in the booklet that it sent to voters in the Nice Two referendum to inform them what that referendum was about. Seven years later, when it came to the Lisbon Two referendum, Brian Cowen’s Fianna Fail Government did the same, and drew attention again to the Triple Lock as a guarantee that Irish neutrality would not be affected by the 2009 Lisbon Treaty.

Abolishing the Triple Lock now would retroactively be to turn the Bertie Ahern Government of 2002 and the Brian Cowen Government of 2009 into liars and deceivers of the Irish people.

Without the Triple Lock Ireland would have been able to take part fully in the wars in Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya – none of which had the legal sanction of a UN mandate.

The 2009 Lisbon Treaty gave the new European Union that it established a Federal Constitution and legal personality for the first time, and made us all real citizens of the post-Lisbon EU,  so that we all now have two citizenships, just as in the Federal USA or Germany.  

If the EU is attacked, everyone now has a legal civic duty to defend it. Abolishing the Triple Lock would remove an obstacle to introducing conscription in Ireland, as is now being planned in Germany and other EU States.

Abolishing the Triple Lock now would mean that in a future national reunification referendum, if the Government of the day were to make commitments to Northern Unionists to meet their concerns, what credence could they put on those if a previous Irish Government  – namely the current one  – had repudiated  the solemn National Declaration on neutrality and the Triple Lock made in the 2002 and 2009 referendums?

If Heather Humphreys or Jim Gavin had been elected President on Saturday week last, the Government would have taken that as a popular mandate to abolish the Triple Lock.  Catherine Connolly’s victory on a platform that emphasised neutrality, maintaining the Triple Lock and upholding the State’s Art. 29.1 constitutional imperative to support “the pacific settlement of international disputes”shows that the current Government has no popular mandate for its abolition policy.

It should now abandon that proposal.

Anthony Coughlan

Spokesman,

The National Platform EU Research and Information Centre

24 Crawford Avenue  

Dublin 9

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