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Securing the State with Soldier Spies: evaluating the Risks of using Military Personnel to gather Surveillance Evidence in Ireland

This article grew directly from the platform of research manifest in the monograph Re-evaluating Irish national security policy: affordable threats? But it constitutes a significant advance on it in at least one major respect. The book identified as a critical risk to Irish security the unravelling of the public’s bind to the state, in the wake of troubling occurrences including judicial findings of systematic misbehaviour and poor management standards within Ireland’s national security apparatus. At issue also in this context were Ireland’s widely contested ability to deal with threats, and the introduction of draconian powers that might well equip a retreating state to tackle threats but if badly operated would backfire on the security apparatus and public perception of its integrity. The paper was triggered by the Irish Governments enactment, some months following publication of the book, of the Criminal Justice (Surveillance) Act 2009. The paper provided an urgently required theoretically-informed, inter-disciplinary analysis of its most radical impact: the act provided for the Irish military to undertake surveillance admissible in Ireland’s criminal and security courts. It was, thus, equipped equally to the civil power (the Garda) yet subject to significantly weaker public accountability mechanisms. Conceptually, the paper utilises concepts of broadened security associated with the Copenhagen School of Security Studies, as well as ideas of high and low policing borrowed from Criminal Justice and Policing Studies.