Members of the Garda Siochana have a growing and honourable record of public service abroad. Since 1989 members of the force have served, generally under the umbrella of the United Nations or other internationally recognised bodies, in Namibia, Angola, Cambodia, South Africa, Mozambique, Somalia, El Salvador, Tajikistan, Palestine, Western Sahara and East Timor. Fifty six gardai are today at work in Bosnia, Croatia and Cyprus.
The tasks carried out are the sort of unglamorous duties that do not make for attention-grabbling headlines but are essential for the establishment or restoration of functioning democracies. They have included monitoring the conduct of elections and reporting on their fairness; the re-imposition and maintenance of the rule of law, often after periods of traumatic upheaval or war; and the training of locally recruited personnel capable, in time, of running permanent indigenous police forces.
These are noble tasks with which few would - or should - quibble. It is a mark of Ireland's maturity and success as a nation-state and member of the European Union that personnel from this State are regarded as having a valuable contribution to make in this arena. The emerging suggestion that the Republic would be expected to contribute gardai to a 5,000 strong police force connected to the EU's proposed 60,000 strong Rapid Reaction military force should be approached bearing this experience in mind. The suggestion is contained in a draft report, Strengthening The Common European Security and Defence Policy, to be discussed by the European Council next week in Feira, Portugal. If the draft is accepted, the incoming French presidency of the EU will be seeking during its six months' leadership of the Union explicit commitments on numbers from member-states.
In Ireland's case, this means agreeing to some 1,000 soldiers and gardai (the great majority would be troops) being assigned notionally to the Rapid Reaction Force on 60 days' standby. Once dispatched, troops of the force would be mandated to conduct peace-keeping and, inevitably, some peace-enforcing operations, together with humanitarian tasks and rescue missions - in any part of the world. According to the Government such operations would have to be conducted under the auspices of the United Nations, or at the very least in accordance with UN principles.
The police component of any such operation would come into play after the blunt instrument of military force had been used. The template is a Kosovo-type situation where, following Nato-led military action, police from several European forces, including the RUC, are helping re-establish (with mixed results it must be allowed) a normal functioning society. It should be of some comfort to those in Ireland who are inherently suspicious of the EU's intentions in this regard that the idea of a police role has the support of the EU's other neutral or militarily non-aligned states - Sweden, Finland and Austria. Their experience is well calculated to envisage precisely such a role for civilian crisis-management in new EU's new security and defensive identity.