Northern Ireland Declares Independence - A Political Theorising Thread

Okay people it's time for a round of political and military theorising.

Based on a post I made in The Military Thread and expanded in scope to cover a broader spectrum of topics the idea is that, in an alternate version of Northern Ireland that has been devoid of the sectarian conflict and violence the real Northern Ireland has, we Tropers have taken control with myself as leader.

We have, through skilled negotiation, peacefully declared ourselves a Sovereign Nation - Independent of both The UK and the Republic of Ireland.

Our departure from the UK has been on amicable terms and we are politically stable with a strong constitution and us Tropers making up the Government.

Our population is 2 Million (The real life Northern Ireland has 1.75) and our Land Area is 13,843 km². Our official languages are English and Irish, although only Irish is only spoken by the minority.

(I will take the role of Head of State for in-scenario purposes, but primarily will be basically acting as the thread's Dungeon Master. I will come up with various issues and situations relating to the running of such a country and the idea is to create serious discussions on how a real country in such situations would/should/could behave in order to produce the best results for it and it's people.)

I have two issues to start us off:

ISSUE NUMBER ONE

We are a completely new state with almost no existing diplomatic ties. The only diplomatic ties we have so far are with our immediate neighbours The Republic of Ireland and the UK. We have friendly relations and non-aggression treaties with both. Other than that? Nothing.

The issue is, how do we go about setting up our International Diplomacy?

Which countries do we want to befriend? Which countries do we want to approach about trade agreements? Do we want to set up alliances with any countries and which ones would be the most receptive to such a thing?

Do we want to apply for membership of the European Union and possibly even the European Single Currency?

Should we apply to join NATO? What would be our stance on the Middle East? What countries would be our enemies? What countries could we not afford to piss off?

You get the idea.

ISSUE NUMBER TWO

As a newly formed state we are now responsible for our own defence.

Assuming a blank cheque, how would we go about setting up a comprehensive and well rounded military?

We would require at the very least an Army, a Navy and an Air Force and the ultimate goal would be our becoming a strong and credible Military power in the world. Not, you know, Switzerland.

(FACTORS TO BE TAKEN INTO CONSIDERATION)

1. 1: Northern Ireland currently lacks any significant military infrastructure other than a few barracks. Any military infrastructure required will need to be constructed from scratch.

2. 2: Northern Ireland has 3 Airports. Two local and one International. The International Airport is the only one able to accommodate large aircraft.

3. 3 Northern Ireland has two major ports, Larne and Belfast. Both situated fairly close to each other on the East Coast of the Country. There are no large ports on the North Coast.

4. 4 The Railway Network has minimal coverage with no railway infrastructure at all in the West and South of the Country and no capacity for carrying freight.

5. 5 Northern Ireland currently is severely lacking in a manufacturing capacity. If we wish to produce any of our own military equipment we will need to either a) Create Nationalised Manufacturing Plants or b) Provide heavy subsidies and tax benefits to arms manufacturing corporations in order to encourage them to set up shop locally.

6. 6 The inhabited island of Rathlin, off the coast of Ballycastle in the North of the country, is part of Northern Ireland and should be taken into consideration when drawing up defence plans. It's permanent population is around 100 and is considered a wildlife refuge. Any attempts to construct a base on the island would be met with SEVERE opposition from residents and environmental groups.

(QUESTIONS THAT MUST BE CONSIDERED)

1. 1 Although Northern Ireland currently has no nuclear facilities, should we endeavour to become a Nuclear Power?

2. 2 Which branch of our Armed Forces should be responsible for any and all Military endeavours involving Space? Should matters involving Outer Space be given their own branch.

3. 3 Military Satellites are an obvious necessity but Northern Ireland currently lacks any facilities for launching things into orbit. Should we develop such facilities and launch our own satellites or pay another country for the use of their facilities?

4. 4 Which countries should we negotiate arms deals with and what would we want to buy and/or sell?

Further complicating things is the fact that a second crisis is brewing over the Falkland Islands.

Armed conflict at this point seems to be becoming inevitable and if war does break out, Britain will without doubt ask for our assistance. Failing to do so will be guaranteed to make Britain and large segments of our population furious with us and would likely cause London to reconsider the idea of our independence.

As such the principle military threat to our nation should be (Barring us royally pissing off someone else) Argentina and any allies they may bring in.

There you have it folks. Get cracking and please note that I do intend this to be a serious discussion topic. No blathering on about nonsense like building Gundams or researching the T-Virus okay?

edited 9th Nov '10 10:35:37 PM by Capt.Fargle

Can we make up a fake history? Like Ireland got Home Rule in the 1920s and then went full independent as two countries? Nah?

Question 1 I would think would be a large no. To get nuclear power, you're going to need to import infrastructure, knowledge and materials to make structures with expensive one time costs that will probably make anyone who lives near them nervous. The best power platform would probably be wind and tidal based with exporting oil and gas from the bits of the Irish sea you have rights to to the UK and Europe. To get nuclear weapons...you're not signed up to NPT maybe, but your only diplomatic ties are to people who are. You want to sell oil and gas to Europe and you can't make nukes yourself so you'd have to pay some other nation interested in you having nukes to give them to you. You're not getting nukes.

You would probably already get EU membership if you split off and it would be in your favour to not form a barrier in anyway to companies across Europe, especially in UK or Ireland, and you'd probably have an eye on European trading.

Being part of NATO? Why bother. That's about being part of a US led system to protect against Russian invasion, your geography puts you safer than France in the 60s.

"Armed conflict at this point seems to be becoming inevitable and if war does break out, Britain will without doubt ask for our assistance. "

Ha ha ha. No.

2 Which branch of our Armed Forces should be responsible for any and all Military endeavours involving Space? Should matters involving Outer Space be given their own branch.

The way the US does it is through the Air Force, all space based military assets are part of Air Force Space Command.

As a small country next to a larger one, I would say you don't need a military that covers all the bases. You need a coast guard to patrol your waters, a small air force, if any, and only recon planes at that. Because of the small amount and size of your airports I would recommend being the first country to exclusively invest in UAV's. Because of your location you could pilot your UAVs from Ireland all the way to France.

You only really need an Army there to suppress civil disorder when the police are not sufficient, so pretty much just infantry of the various combat arms varieties and nothing heavier than a Bradley/Stryker sized APC that can absorb small arms. Invest in active denial systems as your counter to weapons like RPG's.

You don't really have the money or population to have a military that can be used for anything other than self defense.

edited 10th Nov '10 4:15:30 AM by Barkey

Re-posting from the Military Thread:

You need 3 key areas for a successful military defense system that can competently defend territory such as that. Mainly an Army, a Navy and an Air Force.

You will have to be building or converting infrastructure to do this.

Secondly, what sort of population numbers are we talking? Any country less than 30 million in population is likely going to require conscription in order to meet the needs of civil defense. (Case in point: Israel has just over 8 million people not counting Palestinians and relies on conscription to keep the IDF staffed.) Conscription then carries its own problems since historically and realistically, volunteers are much more capable, however it can be argued that conscription is needed for low pop. states because there are simply not enough volunteers to cover all the needs.

Thirdly, which potential enemies are you most worried about? The British Royal Army? The US Navy? What? Knowing who your potential enemies are greatly assists in knowing who you are from a military standpoint. Or in the simplified words of Sun Tzu: Know your enemy and know yourself.

I'm writing up an alternate history for all this now. Should make things more interesting.

Perhaps we could tie this into the Constitution Thread (just so we have a form of government nailed down), and who knows, this could evolve into a totally made up country - Troperia.

I'll drop a line there.

EDIT: If the two threads work together, then we can leve the political stuff out of this thread for the most part - we'll have a Constitution to work under, and based off of whtever it says there, it will determine our working relationship with the civil government.

Just a thought - no sense in duplicating effort, right?

edited 10th Nov '10 9:33:52 AM by pvtnum11

On the economic side, start looking for the big markets. Membership of the EU allows unrestricted trade with the EU at the cost of having to follow EU regulations. This will have to be carefully examined and balanced up. If the EU is not joined, then I'd suggest looking westward for trade with the US, and eastward towards China. (Following in Britains recent approach to expand trade there.)

What kinds of industries does Northern Ireland have at present? We need to know where the majority of our employment and taxation revenues come from.

Councillors Tom and Barkey have covered the military basics. However, Northern Ireland does not have the ability to defend itself alone. The UK and Eire are not going to attack, not for centuries to come and without a major cultural shift at any rate, but efforts should be made to maintain relations as closely as possible, without undermining our own interests of course.

Of course, every good diplomatic protection should have a back up. We cannot hope to defeat the British army or even Eire in case of war; we are simply too small. And we certainly wouldn't beat any European army. What we can do is make any invasion expensive and any occupation unsustainable. Therefore a standing army with a focus built solely for self defense should be developed, and if relations are that bad, a conscription based army based off the Swiss should be considered. As our most powerful neighbour is separated by water, the hallmark of this defense should be a powerful airforce. We should aim to keep any invasion off our shores.

But hopefully it will never come to that. Not in this century.

EDIT: I'll deal with the four questions in a second. For the first two now;

1: Do we seriously need a nuclear deterrent? The UK, our allies, have all the nukes to spare, and we should focus on sorting out our domestic situation and becoming a strong economic power.

2: Again, we're tiny. We don't need a space program, so to speak. What we could develop is an industry built around supplying space parts to different countries with space programs. We could make a killing and stake a claim that we contribute a great deal to humanitys advancement in that field.

3: Again, unless relations with the UK deteriorate this should not be necessary.

4: Thats an ethical question. Trade with Europe and the US is fine, along with stable democracies. Trade with Russia, China and other emerging nations without democracy is a bit more sketchy.

Essentially our policy on who we sell weapons to should be conducted on the basis of our likelihood of seeing those guns directed at someone we would rather not get shot.

If war looks likely, and the UK wants our assistance, if the nation they are fighting could become a credible threat to us, go for it. If not, no. Its their fight. If they're going to threaten us over it, we can kick up a storm about it on the international community. I doubt very much the UK want to be seen as tyrants. We can consider helping them off our own backs, but that is a decision to be taken for Ireland, not the UK. We may want to help for the sake of maintaining our relationship with the rest of Britain however. But Eire has never stood with the UK army, why should we allow ourselves to be forced into it?

edited 10th Nov '10 9:52:16 AM by GameChainsaw

Maintaining a good relationship to the other nations of the British isles would be good.

How much coastline do we need to defend?

It would appear that we had a history of shipbuilding. Good, we can make our own costal patrol ships.

But, with only a bit less that two million citizens, our armed force will be quite small.

Figure 6 out of every 1000, (like Ireland), and we'd have a total armed forces personnel count of approximately 11000 personnel - and unless we rely on civilian support for a lot of the support services that an armed force needs, about three quarters of that figure will be non-combatant personnel - so you would have under 3000 actual combat troops.

Increasing that ratio will give us more troops, naturally. Could we afford to do that?

3000 actual combat troops? You can't defend even a moderately sized town with that much let alone an entire nation.

Partially true - that 11,000 figure isn't divvied up into braches or anything - that's the total size of our force if we use the 6:1000 figure that is what Ireland has right now.

3000 troops, if it was strictly a land force, would be what, a Regiment?

We could go higher. I used that figure only as a baseline value.

As far as the direction I'd want land forces to go, I'd be happy with Motorized Infatry. Move in fast with armored vehicles, disembark and maneuver to the enemy, while the armored vehicles provide supporting fires.

^^^^ Just pointing out that the British Army is not called the Royal Army. Only the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force have that distinction.

</pedantry>

I don't really want to merge this with the Constitution Thread. I'd rather keep it as a separate exercise.

As for the military discussion, let's split it into two separate trains of though. One where Northern Ireland has suddenly discovered within it's own borders the world's only source of Raritanium and as such now has more money than God and can spend Trillions on defence.

The other being much more realistic and in line with Alternate History Scenario that I'm writing and which will be up shortly. Then we compare the two and see what results.

That way if someone wants to discuss the theoretical implications of Military training/equipment that a tiny nation like Northern Ireland could never afford they can.

The coastline of Northern Ireland is 650km long.

Our principle industries at this point (Barring the service industry) are Tourism, Agriculture and recently the Green Energy sector has been becoming quite prominent. Attempts to encourage the development of the high-tech manufacturing sector have also met with some promising early results but not nearly enough to be considered a principle industry. It might become one though with further encouragement.

With regards to the shipbuilding industry, Belfast has a long history of it but it has fallen into total decline in recent decades and as such no-ships are currently constructed in Northern Ireland. The old shipyards of Harland and Wolff have been massively downsized and now construct offshore wind turbines and platforms.

There remains much nostalgic fondness for the ship building industry however, such that any attempts to revive it would be met with near unanimous approval. The problem remains though that no-facilities for doing so remain and any attempts to to revitalise the industry would basically be starting from scratch.

I'm cool with not merging it - it was just a thought. I'll stay out of the fantastic stuff, also, I'm more interested in the realistic approach to this.

Wind turbines, huh? that's good to know - if we have lts of natural power to use, we won't be needed nuclear power much, and that means we'lll rely less on fossil fuels.

Yeah, this industry stuff is all taken directly from real life btw. That is actually what the real Harland and Wolff does now. Wind Power and Green Energy in general has been getting much more noticeable here lately. There's been a lot of windmills going up in the last ten years.

I'd advise concentration on the incoming green industry. Manufacture of wind-farms and research into green technologies should be a focus; if we can get a specialised niche in there it will bring in a lot of money.

Only go for the shipbuilding industry if it is cost effective; many nations design ships at very competitive prices; we may have trouble keeping up. We ended up out of the business for a reason.

Edited out.

Keep up the tourism industry, always bags of money to be made there.

edited 10th Nov '10 11:17:14 AM by GameChainsaw

Yeah. 4.3 US citizens self-identify as Scotch-Irish. There's a focus point for tourism there. Set up a Cultural Preservation Committee to keep everything older than 400 years around. Also it may be beneficial to have easy transport across the Irish sea to Scotland and England. Upping tourist boats numbers, the ferries and setting up large naval sporting events will allow a home boat market and aid the tourism.

Focusing on green energy means that imports of fossil fuels can be kept low. Now most of the Irish sea oil I know about is on the East side but there might be a point for exploration. If you have high tech investments coming in and you have that interest then you may want to use revenues from any fuel exports to reinvest into that sector. Effectively doing what several gulf countries and Norway do- taking a finite resource and turning it into a sustainable high tech industry and education investment.

Considering you're in one of the strongest wind and tidal locations in the world, you might even want to consider setting up a way to sell energy to the UK.

Also look at other small countries, even the islands, who set themselves up as favourable locations for companies to set up shop. Not quite the Caymans but you have Jersey, Qatar etc. trying to get themselves a high global company density.

ALTERNATE HISTORY TIME, PART ONE

Northern Ireland emerged as a country from the counties in Ireland who wished to remain within the UK when The Republic of Ireland gained independence from Britain in the 1920's. Consisting of six counties, Antrim, Londonderry, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Armagh and Down that elected voluntarily to remain British.

Governed by a semi-autonomous Parliament from Stormont House in the Capital City of Belfast, in a manner nearly identical to that of the Scottish Parliament in Holyrood, Northern Ireland's voluntary membership of the UK became a strained subject following the onset of World War 2.

World War 2 was devastating for Northern Ireland, both because of it's small population and the fact that the cast majority of industrial capacity was situated on it's two major harbours - Belfast and Larne.

Northern Ireland, being an easier route for overseas aid to arrive from America and Canada, became a key strategic point in breaking Nazi naval blockades and thus a high profile target for the Axis Powers.

Belfast, containing a major port and large, high profile shipyards, ended up bearing the brunt of Nazi aggression. Over the course of the war Belfast suffered from a prolonged bombing campaign by the Axis powers and, being the literal hub for trade, industry and population in the country - containing almost half of Northern Ireland's total population at the time, huge amounts of infrastructure vital to the success of Northern Ireland ended up being wiped out.

In addition to this, the huge casualty rate suffered in World War 2 resulted in much of the population complaining that if Northern Ireland had joined the Republic when it became independent, that they wouldn't have faced the complete loss of family and livelihood that was now occurring - owing to the Republic Of Ireland remaining strictly neutral throughout the conflict.

When the war ended, Northern Ireland was in ruins. Belfast's industrial capacity was utterly devastated and estimates suggested that as much as 1/3rd of the adult male population had been killed in the fighting.

In the aftermath of the war general political discourse in Northern Ireland became immediately centred around the merits and demerits of leaving the UK and attempting to create a United Ireland.

The situation quickly escalates into political deadlock, with neither side gaining any ground or making significant progress while the country begins to stagnate under the lack of strong leadership.

The government in London refuses to step in saying that it's "Matter for Northern Ireland to work out for itself", fearing that stepping it would provoke armed conflict while the Republic of Ireland refuses to step in because it doesn't want to be saddled with the economic and political wasteland that is the North.

The situation reaches boiling point in the mid seventies when the disenfranchised and pissed off students of Northern Ireland, fed up with political deadlock that has lasted as long as they've been alive, act under to perceived failure of Western Democracy and begin staging communist protests.

This, quite obviously, since it's still the middle of the Cold War panics the British who give immediate orders for all communist rallies to be cracked down on, HARD.

This, however, immediately galvanises the Anti-British factions in Northern Ireland together and the situation escalates into an open revolt that becomes known as "The Troubles" while Belfast and the other largest settlements descend into what is essentially Civil War.

Start talks of federation with Ireland proper. It'd probably be less cost in the long run than to create a sovereign state from scratch.