On Thursday morning, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, David Andrews, called a meeting of neutral EU countries. That night, he offered his thoughts to an RTE Prime Time reporter in Berlin who was trying to clarify Ireland's position on the NATO strikes. The reporter asked his response to Sweden's belief that the bombings were illegal under international law. "We wouldn't be far from them in their point of view," replied the Minister.
Mr Andrews's equivocation describes the current state of Irish neutrality in a nutshell. It all depends on where you're coming from. Irish neutrality is a matter of pragmatism, dressed up as principle. As such, it is almost impossible to define.
Such pragmatism is morally corrosive. Its vacuousness was best revealed by the fact that Des O'Malley actually had to ask the question "How can anyone be neutral in the face of tyranny?" As if our neutrality means we cannot take a stand.
Mr Andrews had already defined the national position on the bombings as somewhere between a rock and a hard place. Under questioning, he amplified. "We will never become members of NATO," said Mr Andrews. "Our neutrality is sacred and sacrosanct . . . we will protect our position. We will preserve our position . . . I haven't sat on the fence - there's no fence-sitting here." Fighting words, which bring us no further in understanding where, if anywhere, the Government actually stands - with a foot in both camps is the inevitable conclusion.
At Shannon the day before, the Taoiseach and the Tanaiste met the Russian Prime Minister for trade talks. Condemning the bombing might have helped those negotiations. Within 24 hours, the Taoiseach was in Berlin for the Agenda 2000 negotiations. Condemning the bombing might have damaged them. This see-saw position is the logical outcome of the brand of neutrality Ireland has adopted since the second World War. No wonder the Taoiseach chose to busy himself with the Agenda 2000 negotiations, when virtually every other EU leader chose to speak directly to their citizens to clarify each national position.
Neutrality need not be passive, but this is what years of neglect have allowed Irish neutrality to become. Irish neutrality is confused and confusing. It is economic policy masquerading as foreign policy. It is political expediency which tries to fool most of us most of the time - unlike Sweden, which has asserted its neutrality as a positive force on many occasions throughout this militaristic century.
THE neutrality Eamon de Valera asserted made a certain sense in its time. It fitted a country gripped by trade war with Britain, lacking international markets and slowly trying to develop an indigenous economy.
It also picked up on a fear of the outside world which had deeper cultural resonances, not least Padraig Pearse's belief in a special moral authority native to the Irish race. The downside was considerable. Because neutrality was presented as patriotic, instead of non-militarist, it was less possible for us to acknowledge the contribution of the many Irish people who of their own accord joined the fight against Hitler.
Time and again, it gave us a handy excuse for singing dumb about human rights abuses and aggressive military actions when we should have shouted out. Meanwhile, we managed to avoid the tough issues of militarism at home.
The old reasons are gone, but they do illuminate why David Andrews used such religious language to talk about neutrality. "Sacred and sacrosanct", like old-style Fianna Fail and old-style Ireland. Pearse could not have put it better.
Ireland's neutrality is fence-sitting turned into an art. We fool ourselves that we have made our neutrality count, when the reality is our neutrality has benefited no one but us - some of us. Neutrality has worked as an economic strategy, allowing the State to trade with places where human and civil rights apply only to the elite.
It continues to let us adopt the moral high ground in face of competing power struggles between the world's emerging security complexes, judging everyone as though we have the moral edge, as Pearse and others believed. This is neutrality by default.
Such is the fog into which our lazy neutrality has brought us that whereas Bill Clinton was pressed to make reference to China's human rights abuses when he visited there, Bertie Ahern didn't even have to comment. That cannot be a matter of national pride.
It is time to reality-check our neutrality and to assert it as a positive force. Neutrality need not mean that we are morally inert. There is a place for a powerful, articulate, non-military neutrality within the shifting scenarios of the new world security complexes, including Europe.
The outside world is not waiting to contaminate us. NATO is not a wicked man trying to take our virginity. It is a security complex trying to assert itself as a world power which will protect the industrial and economic interests of its member-states. Its links to the armaments industry are dubious and may affect its decisions, but NATO matters more to Ireland than Ireland does to it. It will probably protect us from aggression, whatever we do.
We must adopt a critical position about NATO's development in the post-Cold War scenario. We may note how Tony Blair's support for Bill Clinton's global strategies is enabling him restore the United Kingdom's purchase on European and wider international power. Watching the way Russia is being sidelined in the Balkans, we can remember the 1905 Austrian annexation which so humiliated Russia and set the first World War in motion, and wonder why.
But we also need to note that Ireland has already taken the first step to joining a European-wide security complex in signing the Schengen Agreement. This, arguably, has potentially greater consequences for long-term neutrality than has the plan to join the Partnership for Peace, recently adopted by the Fianna Fail parliamentary party.
Eamon de Valera offering his sympathies on the death of Adolf Hitler is a good example of Irish neutrality at its most pedantic, but the State's double-think about the NATO air strikes makes the pedantry live again. Of course Bertie Ahern would never pay our respects to the Serbian consulate on the demise of Slobodan Milosevic, but whether for reasons of principle or pragmatism remains to be seen.
If history teaches us anything, it is that peace is a loaded word. It is not something passive or necessarily pacifist. It is a powerful, difficult and intrinsically ethical stance.
We need a new protocol on neutrality. If we cannot devise one, we will find ourselves taking part in someone else's military-industrial complex by the back door. A few decades on, we may even find ourselves facilitating their armaments on the basis that, heck, after all, it's good for business.