RADICAL changes since the Cold War have led to a reconsideration of Ireland's role in international security, according to the political director of the Department of Foreign Affairs.
Mr Richard Townsend said: "During the Cold War era, for most countries in Europe security policy did not have a separate existence - security policy was synonymous with military defence."
Since the disappearance of the threat of war, however, the view of security policy had changed. The challenges now addressed by security policy include risks to the environment, drug trafficking, instability due to ethnic tensions, human rights abuses and minorities issues.
Against this background, the recently published White Paper on Foreign Policy had said the Government would discuss with the Western European Union (WEU) the possibility of involvement in its humanitarian, rescue and peacekeeping tasks. Ireland would also consider joining the Nato sponsored Partnership for Peace programme.
However, Prof Patrick Keatinge, senior research fellow at the Institute of European Affairs, said Ireland showed a "Jekyll and Hyde" approach to European security. On the one hand, there was the position of the Department of Foreign Affairs that the EU Presidency would involve a greater presence in Bosnia. "Then Dr Hyde throws fits at the idea of Partnership for Peace - a sort of state of the art play school for peacekeepers. This is more like a recipe for passivity and irrelevance than a coherent security policy."
He said three of the four nonaligned states in the EU were participating in the Ifor force in Bosnia. Only Ireland was not.