The likely sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines has raised fears that further maritime infrastructure could be next. One possible reason behind that attack may have been to send a message to European states: your maritime energy pipelines are vulnerable. Academics who study international relations sometimes call this type of phenomenon 'horizontal escalation': countries locked in a conflict in one geographical area will seek to broaden the battlefield and send a strong message elsewhere.
Of course, it cannot yet be proven that Russia was behind this incident and they have, predictably, denied it. However, it has certainly placed NATO and EU coastal states on high alert. Norway, for whom offshore oil and gas are an essential part of their national wealth, have surged their naval, coastguard and air forces into extra patrols. Other NATO or EU countries are responding in similar ways.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's The Business, security and defence analyst Prof Michael Clarke on vulnerable maritime infrastructure and what Ireland should be paying attention to
But not Ireland. Because Ireland has nothing much to surge. Our naval service, through no fault of its own, has just basic patrol vessels. Although excellent ships, they simply lack the most advanced sonar or underwater drones that would be essential to provide long endurance monitoring of subsea cables and gas pipelines. A planned 'multi-beam sonar', which could be carried by existing ships, has not yet been procured.
Our Navy is also crippled by staffing shortages and a retention crisis that prohibits anything other than a basic ‘presence mission’ or fishery protection. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the UK recently announced plans to commission a new maritime monitoring vessel specifically to watch over trans-Atlantic cables. Such a vessel would however, do nothing to protect our subsea gas or electricity links.
Our Air Corps actually have considerable experience in maritime surveillance and are receiving brand new aircraft which will have an advanced ‘laser radar’ (LIDAR) that can detect some submerged activities in shallow waters. Yet these aircraft do not have the fuller suite of systems to credibly detect, classify and track submarines, underwater drones or divers who might be active in our deeper waters - and there will be only two of these aircraft by 2023 anyhow.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Morning Ireland, Lieutenant General Seán Clancy, Chief of Staff of the Defence Forces, on the Commission on the Defence Forces' report into how it operates.
What quickly emerges is that Ireland, unlike Norway, is much more open and vulnerable to hostile state or non-state behaviour in our waters, not least because those waters are vast, extending out to the Porcupine bank. It has been simply assumed that our naval or air forces should not bother with such things, although the recent Commission on the Defence Forces Report identified capabilities to monitor subsea cables as necessary.
However, the Nord Stream sabotage operations have arguably made this requirement more urgent. Note the underwater threat here is not just from some foreign nation attempting to hack internet subsea cables in our waters, or sabotage gas pipelines from either the UK or the Mayo "Corrib" offshore gas field. Ireland is also wide open to drug smuggling using improvised 'narco-submarines', which have appeared off Spain’s Atlantic coast and are routinely used to carry industrial quantities of drugs from South America to Africa. These can be surprisingly high tech and the next generation may well be smaller, stealthier, unmanned submersibles.
This is not fanciful. Ireland has emerged as a hub for organised drug cartels who have already demonstrated their ingenuity by smuggling with light aircraft. These are also surprisingly hard to detect, not least because Ireland has no military grade radar monitoring but just a simple civilian air-traffic control network that can be relatively easily circumvented. The reality is Ireland’s sea and air borders are pretty wide open for those with hostile intent, money and the capability or determination to cause mischief.
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From RTÉ One's Nine News, concern over Ireland's ability to protect undersea cables
The rather naive assumption appears to have been that nobody would ever have much reason to interfere with our subsea infrastructure. Probably another factor has been a general ignorance about just how significant Ireland’s subsea infrastructure is. Given that Ireland has no gas storage nor any facilities to dock floating gas terminals, we are uniquely at the mercy of the existing gas pipelines from the Mayo field or from Scotland. Electricity interconnectors also link us to the UK and, by 2026, with France.
These subsea energy links are vital today but there may be many more in the future, including to offshore wind farms and possibly, marine hydrogen storage facilities. A quick look at a global submarine cable map reveals Ireland strategic position astride a plethora of trans-Atlantic telecommunications cables, which reinforces our role as a global hub for data centres and internet connectivity. It has been estimated that 95% of internet traffic moves via undersea cable.
Subsea cables are then critical national infrastructure, which in the context of the Ukraine war, now seem surprisingly vulnerable given how far away we are from the frontlines. Yet our world is profoundly interconnected. Sabotaging far away Irish gas pipelines, subsea electricity cables, or underwater internet cables might make perfect sense within the logic of ‘horizontal escalation’. Could Ireland, devoid of NATO alliance protection and with only minimal means of subsea detection or monitoring, fit the profile of the next best ‘soft target’ for whoever wrecked the Nord Stream pipes?
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
