I'm John Batchel with my colleague Gregory Copley, Defense and Foreign Affairs.

Looking at the map of Europe, EU and NATO are not the same, but there's overlap.

Ireland is a member of the EU, but not a member of NATO.

Ireland is recovering very nicely, thank you very much. It's got a lot of

backroom business for Silicon Valley. It has a surplus in the government, and it has a serene land

that it says we're neutral in these conflicts, but I learned from the Financial Times in these last

hours that Ireland has no Navy.

It used to have eight warships, now it has four.

That is not adequate for the vulnerability of all of EU, all of NATO.

What?

Not a land invasion of Ireland.

To the west of Ireland, the Western approaches, are all the cables running to and from Europe

to the United States and around the world. Those cables carry the financial news of the moment.

Without those cables, the financial markets have to adjust badly and with a great deal of difficulty.

I'm told by the Financial times. I'm also told by

the financial times that Russia has been using these last years to map out the cables on the west

of Ireland, not the Irish Sea where the, where the Royal Navy patrols, but to the west, there's

said to be no patrols out there. So when, when,

this is the story in the FD, when an Irish warship approaches a Russian warship, they give out a call

and often the Russians don't answer them. They're understood to be mapping the undersea

cables, which are not deep because of the shelf where you fish means the cables

are easily reachable from the surface. So, Gerger, I lay this out as the FT did, and then

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