With the exception of the Second World War, or the Emergency as it was called in Ireland, the external environment in which the State finds itself today has never been in greater flux. In Europe, Russia has ended the continent’s three-decade era of focusing on “peace and prosperity”. Democratic Europe is rearming and the threat of war spreading further west in the years ahead is real in the minds of many of Ireland’s EU partners. That Sweden, a neutral country since the time of Napoleon, has joined Nato is perhaps the clearest single sign of how much has changed in…

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