Caitriona Heinl
A RECENT Irish Times lecture about the shamefully inadequate state of Ireland’s security strategy referred to the “independent security think tank”, the Azure Forum. Independent of whom? A list of Azure’s activities, personnel and MO indicates a company very much linked to the western defence industry and also to the new Irish establishment’s demand for Ireland to tool up with very expensive weapons of modern warfare.
Goldhawk first came across Azure in 2022, just two years or so after it was founded by Caitríona Heinl, its current executive director, who was then also a research fellow at the School of Politics and International Relations at UCD (SPIRU).
Another director alongside Heinl at Azure, as well as her colleague at SPIRU, is professor Ben Tonra. He is a hawk when it comes to discussion on Irish ‘free-loading’, once arguing that Irish neutrality is “amoral, often immoral, and hypocritical” (see The Phoenix 3/12/21).
Although Tonra did not become a director of Azure until last year, he and Heinl organised a series of discussions in 2020, entitled Ireland’s Research & Innovation Opportunities in the European Defence Fund.
Azure described how “the Azure Forum and University College Dublin (UCD) launched an expert panel series on Ireland’s defence research, technology and innovation base and the opportunities/challenges for this sector that arise from the EU’s European Defence Fund (EDF)… The aim is to create greater awareness in the sector and to identify policy options to strengthen Ireland’s engagement in, and return from, these programmes.”
This sounds more like a business plan than an appeal to save Ukraine and the rest of the EU from the rapacious Russians.
But Azure has also written reports on the Irish defence industry for the “Irish Defence and Security Association, providing strategic insights into cyber attacks and promoting greater bilateral security cooperation between Ireland and Britain”.
It has also included among its speakers British rear admiral (rtd) Dr Chris Parry CBE, US naval officer Mark Nevitt and ransomware expert Chris Painter, a former official at the US Department of Justice who has worked at the FBI.
Back in the business/defence world, Heinl acted as an associate partner at Vedette Consulting Ireland, which was set up in 2018. A 2020 report by Vedette, working in conjunction with the defence department and the Defence Forces, produced a feasibility study on Ireland’s defence technology and innovation. Vedette received €30,012 for its contribution to the joint report.
Three months after the report advocating the development of an Irish arms industry, Heinl was appointed to the Commission on the Defence Forces, which subsequently recommended that Ireland should increase its defence budget from €1.1bn to €1.5bn by 2028, with an option for further increases.
Heinl told the MacGill Summer School in 2022 that Ireland was an outlier in defence, Nato and EU policy. She was also a speaker at Micheál Martin’s “inclusive” forum on security two years ago.
Caitríona was head girl at Alexandra College in Dublin in the late 1990s and has degrees from Cambridge University and the University of Innsbruck, as well as a comprehensive CV in the western security complex.
One imagines she was a tough cookie on the hockey pitch.
