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........

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