A Principle in the Fog, Ireland’s Boycott

In organizational sociology, a 1977 paper by John Meyer and Brian Rowan, published in the American Journal of Sociology, became one of the field’s most cited texts. Meyer and Rowan argued that an institution’s formal structures often exist not for efficiency but to conform to the societal myths expected of them. An institution adopts the rules its environment expects, but that adoption sometimes stays disconnected from actual practice, what the authors called decoupling. Their best known example is hospitals, which publish the number of patients treated but rarely the number cured, because the institution’s formal duty is to treat, not necessarily to cure. Form and practice can live under the same roof, independent of each other.

Ireland’s new state aircraft offers a small but clear case of this concept. Shortly before last Christmas, the Irish Air Corps took delivery of a Dassault Falcon 6X, a 53 million euro (61 million dollar) aircraft replacing the ageing Learjet. Missing from its nose is FalconEye, a vision system that lets aircraft land in fog and other low-visibility conditions. The system is absent because one of its manufacturers is the Israeli company Elbit Systems, and buying it would have required the Irish state to enter a written agreement directly with Elbit. Procurement officials decided this was “a step too far.”

That decision sits inside a much wider frame, Ireland’s relationship with Israel, which stands, in RTÉ’s own phrase, at an all-time low. Israel withdrew its ambassador while opposition parties were already debating whether to expel her. Ireland is preparing to bring the long-delayed Occupied Territories Bill into law in the summer of 2026, which would make it the first EU member state to ban imports from West Bank settlements. Discussing the bill in April, Taoiseach Martin said something worth pausing on, that it would be “largely symbolic,” meant to pressure Israel. So the person at the top of the institution has already conceded that part of its own formal structure is, in Meyer and Rowan’s terms, a myth decoupled from practice.

Where the decoupling stops is more instructive than where it continues. Four new Airbus helicopters for the Irish Air Corps arrived with Helionix cockpit systems, co-developed with Elbit. The new maritime patrol aircraft arrived with an Israeli-made radar. Officials kept these components because they were built too deeply into the platform, removing them would have compromised the aircraft’s basic functionality. Here, form and practice reunite, because the cost of decoupling now threatens the institution’s own operation. Recall the hospital example, a hospital may not cure every patient, but it has to keep its doors open, and institutional survival takes precedence over symbolic conformity.

Decoupling reaches far beyond state procurement too. Ireland’s relationship with Elbit isn’t new, it goes back to 2007, when the Defence Forces first bought Orbiter drones from Aeronautics Defence Industries, a company later acquired in 2019 by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, which is linked to the Israeli state. According to the Irish Times, Ireland has since spent €8.5 million on Israeli surveillance drones and military equipment. Procurement data puts €2.6 million of that, over the past decade, as going directly to Elbit, while separate figures given to TD Paul Murphy put payments to Elbit and its subsidiaries at more than €4 million over the past five years, two figures from different sources that don’t map neatly onto each other but point in the same direction. More striking still, a Dublin-based client company of Ireland’s own enterprise agency, Enterprise Ireland, InnaLabs, shipped 110 kilograms of drone gyroscopes directly to Elbit’s plant in Israel in July 2025, nearly a year after the boycott policy was announced. The institution policed its imports carefully while applying far less scrutiny to its own exports.

More than one company is involved here, a pattern the investigative outlet The Ditch has uncovered case after case. Powell Electronics in Kildare, once exposed for shipping parts to Elbit, was forced by local protests to announce that no more product would ever leave Ireland for Israel. Limerick-based Analog Devices sent electronic warfare components to Elbit’s subsidiary Elisra through an assembly plant in the Philippines, all while collecting an €85 million grant from Ireland’s state development agency, IDA. The same company’s CEO was personally awarded a science medal by none other than Taoiseach Martin in 2021. The Dublin office of aerospace firm Acra Control was raided by activists over its alleged Elbit ties. None of these companies are part of the state’s formal policy, they’re all private sector, and what actually severed their ties wasn’t state oversight but protest in the street. Elbit itself, according to a BDS movement report, supplies 80 percent of the weapons and equipment used by Israel’s ground forces and 85 percent of the combat drones flown by its air force, so the company sitting at the other end of this decoupling is no minor supplier.

There’s something telling in the fact that what closes this gap isn’t the state’s own oversight but organized social pressure. Meyer and Rowan’s theory held that institutions conform formally to pressure from their environment, but here the real pressure isn’t coming from above the institution, it’s coming from the street below it, protesters and journalists filling the gap that formal mechanisms leave open.

Ireland isn’t alone in this, and it’s exactly the outcome decoupling would predict, because any institution under the same pressure tends to find the same solution, tends to leave a “national interest” door in its own law. When Spain put Europe’s most comprehensive two-way arms embargo into effect, it left exactly this kind of door in its own legislation, and walked through it almost immediately, allowing Airbus to keep importing from Israel, in nearly the same move Ireland made with its own Airbus helicopters. The same government announced it had cancelled a missile contract with Rafael on one hand, while admitting on the other, in its own words, that it was still considering buying an alternative system Israel partly owns, in pursuit of “zero technological dependence.” Italy repeated the same shape, an embargo declared, followed by other cabinet ministers confirming that pre-war contracts and the country’s F-35 partnership remained intact. Three separate governments, three separate laws, but the same line, principle ends here, need begins here.

International relations theory offers a complementary language. The distinction James Fearon developed in 1997, between costly signaling and cheap talk, holds that a state signals genuine resolve either through sunk costs or by tying its own hands, in a way a less committed state couldn’t afford to imitate. Removing FalconEye, since an alternative supplier already existed and the operational loss stayed limited, was close to a costless signal. Keeping the helicopters and the radar shows the opposite, that when real cost entered the picture, the same resolve wasn’t applied. Both theories converge on the same point, what an institution refuses to sacrifice, not what it does sacrifice, maps its actual priorities.

Ireland’s own history carries a precedent for this pattern too, one that shows how an institution legitimizes decoupling through its own memory. The country was among the first in Europe to ban imports from apartheid-era South Africa in the 1980s, and supporters of today’s bill invoke that history deliberately. But a costly signal sent decades ago doesn’t automatically make today’s signal costly too, it simply becomes part of the institution’s own mythology, a memory that can be drawn on to legitimize future symbolic steps.

This pattern is, in fact, part of a larger question Irish scholars themselves have long argued over. Neutrality is counted among the pillars of Irish national identity, but a body of international relations scholarship known as the Unneutral Ireland thesis holds that neutrality itself has mostly stayed at the level of discourse, that in practice the country gave informal but active support to the Allies throughout the Second World War. Decoupling isn’t a concept imported here from outside, it’s a language Irish scholars have already used for decades to describe their own country’s foreign policy identity.

The fog itself isn’t incidental here. Ireland is an island that contends with low visibility for much of the year, and the state’s own aircraft making a choice that makes landing harder in exactly those conditions gives shape to the point where form and practice diverge. Every other system stayed, because without them the institution simply couldn’t function. FalconEye went, because the institution could still function without it, it would just land a little harder on a foggy day.