Ellen Owens

Taking Ireland’s Triple Lock and 100 years of neutrality as a starting point, this work examines how neutrality is being reconfigured under increasing pressure to align with European defence objectives. The Triple Lock, established in 2001 requires three forms of approval for the deployment of Irish troops abroad and has long functioned as a legal and symbolic anchor for protecting Ireland’s military neutrality.

As the European Union calls for rapid mobilisation across Member States under Readiness 2030, this mechanism is increasingly positioned as an obstacle within a broader European push toward accelerated military readiness. This shift is not only enacted through policy, but through the language that sustains it.

Language does more than describe policy; in security contexts, it shapes how threats and responses are understood, and acted upon. As a policy tool, it enables and justifies militarisation while normalising a persistent state of alert. Within this condition, the risk is not only that we react, but that we do so within a field of imagination which has been narrowed by anticipatory logics and autonomous weaponry.

Rather than echoing the language of security policy, the etched metal plates extract and turn these terms back on themselves, exposing the realities of carefully negotiated statecraft. The texts do not resolve, but push back against the persistence of security rhetoric.

In this space, the work asks: within the conditions of readiness, could neutrality gain unprecedented value? And when differing approaches are dismissed as naivety or weakness, what choices remain in shaping our futures? Here, resisting militarisation is not presented as a closed national question, but as an imperfect site through which political, social and cultural possibilities may be imagined and negotiated.

This work refutes the political narrative that the future approaches not as an open field, but as a narrowing path. It asks on whose terms our worlds are being constructed, and how we might tread carefully with intention, wisdom, and restraint, as we wade into the future.