Picture this: fighting has broken out between hardline Communists and the state authorities in Romania, and 60,000 refugees are on their way to the Republic of Ireland. To make matters worse, officials from the Department of Justice have become embroiled in an unseemly public confrontation with the Minister for Foreign Affairs over his handling of the issue, forcing the Taoiseach to intervene.

We have become "the laughing stock of Europe", declares the leader of the opposition as tempers become frayed, particularly in Wexford, where the first 3,000 of those fleeing the conflict are due to arrive this evening.

An unlikely scenario? Perhaps, but the 21 aid workers who gathered for a training exercise in Courtown Harbour last week know they could be called upon at any time to deal with a real-life emergency of similar scale.

After three intensive days of theory, the workers on this residential training course, run by the Agency for Personal Service Overseas (APSO), were presented with a practical assignment. They were broken into four units - representing "the UNHCR", "Wexford County Council", the "Department of Justice" and an advance party of "refugees" from Romania - and told to get ready for a further influx of 3,000 refugees every day for the next three weeks.

Each team was given a no-holds-barred set of instructions, mostly conflicting with the objectives of the others. The "Department of Justice" group, for example, was informed: "With an election year looming, instructions from the Minister are crystal clear: take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that everyone is in a win-win situation, at least amongst the local population and county council. The UNHCR and refugees are of less concern, being foreigners."

For The Irish Times, it was all great fun, watching the reactions of participants when real-life journalist Frank Reidy - playing, as it were, himself - exploited any chink of division between the different agencies.

But those involved set about their tasks with deadly seriousness and agreed, when they had time to talk, that the exercise was a valuable lesson in the need for teamwork and co-operation between different agencies, even when the objectives differ.

APSO is a Government body which last year set up a "rapid response register" of skilled personnel who can be deployed at short notice in overseas emergencies. The register's co-ordinator, Geoff Loane, is a veteran of numerous humanitarian missions abroad. His first assignment, as an Irish Red Cross volunteer in Ethiopia in 1984, taught him the necessity for the type of advance preparation APSO now provides.

"I got the fright of my life," he says, recalling the horror of being confronted with hundreds of people dying from starvation in the village of Mekelle. "Nothing prepared me emotionally, psychologically or even professionally for the situation . . . What they needed was clinical intervention; they didn't need food. No-one told me that. I thought `if they're hungry, give them food', but if you give them food you're going to kill them."

On the other hand, he says, "if you've prepared at home, with all the security and comfort of the local environment and you get a call-up three or six months later, you're so much more advanced. Nothing is going to prepare you for what you'll see, but at least you've thought: `What are the problems? What are the obstacles? What is your specific role?' That's what this course is about."

Among other things, the weeklong course aims to prepare the participants for the complexity of humanitarian emergencies. Aid work, he says, is no longer a question of "feeding the black babies in Africa", the way it was seen in simplistic terms 20 years ago. "It has become very controversial and very political; the current trial in Belgrade of two Australian aid workers is testimony, unfortunately, to that."

The course also emphasised the need to take into account the views of refugees themselves and local people who, despite being the two most important groups in emergency situations, are usually the last to be considered. To that end a number of local people took part in the exercise, accepting visits from the course participants and responding, as they saw fit, to requests for assistance.

Most of those taking part in last week's course in Courtown - one of four of its kind being run this year by APSO - have been through the selection procedure and are already on the rapid response register, and many have previous experience of working on aid programmes abroad. The people on the register go on to work for various aid agencies.

AS THEY gathered in a house on Tara Hill, near Courtown, for the day-long practical assignment, even the most experienced of the group enthused about the value of the exercise. "It's great," said Paul Weymes, a former bank official who has worked for the UN in Somalia and Angola. "It gives you a broad perspective on all the different aspects of an operation like this. There are so many offshoots that need to gel together, or else it just won't work."

Dealing with the media is another aspect of the training course and in this area some of the participants were on a very steep learning curve. As part of the exercise, members of the "UNHCR", "County Council" and "Department of Justice" teams briefed the visiting "Minister for Foreign Affairs", played most plausibly by Walter Jeanty, a Belgian who is studying for a Masters degree in humanitarian assistance at UCD.

As Walter offered words of encouragement while, in true ministerial fashion, declining to make any specific commitments, a Department of Justice "official" pressed him about his and other EU foreign ministers' plans for a longterm solution to the Romanian crisis. If only the official had remembered to tell the journalist, Frank Reidy, that he shouldn't be present for such an occasion, he might have got away with his impertinence.

Instead, he was soon greeted with a newspaper headline circulated by Frank: "Taoiseach intervenes in refugee row". The story went on to explain how a cabinet sub-committee on refugees had been established and the Justice officials who had publicly argued with the Minister for Foreign Affairs had been "reassigned to other duties".

Nobody, though, blamed the media for causing the problem in the first place. Apart from that, it was all very realistic.