Defence Policy in a Limited State: A Structural Analysis of Ireland's Security Posture Under Conditions of Neutrality

Post-Horizon Instrumental Lineage — 4 August 2026 This record forms part of the Post-Horizon Instrumental Lineage of the Architecture of Limitation research programme. The designation and conditions governing subsequent review are established in K1 Open Concordance Phase: A Structured Validation and Evidence-Alignment Programme for the Open Research Release of AoLOS, v1.0, 2 August 2026, doi:10.5281/zenodo.21758275. The record is retained unchanged as evidence of the conditions, tools, concepts, and architectural pressures through which the programme developed. Inclusion in this lineage does not imply retrospective K1 validation or completion of article-level concordance; any proposition-specific qualification, reanalysis, companion publication, or unresolved pressure will be recorded separately through the phase’s declared review process. -- This paper presents a structural analysis of Ireland’s defence posture under conditions of military neutrality. It examines the internal alignment between declared posture, operational capacity, democratic consent, and narrative coherence using a non-prescriptive, architectural method. The analysis deliberately excludes external threat modelling, comparative geopolitics, and policy advocacy. Its purpose is diagnostic rather than normative: to make structural tensions, stress signals, and coherence conditions legible without collapsing analysis into prescription. The methodological approach draws on the Architecture of Limitation (AoL), used here as a discipline for scope control and proportional reasoning rather than as a theoretical or ideological claim. This work belongs to the Architecture of Limitation research program.