Cowen not the best choice for Foreign Affairs

Ronan Keane is the best judge in the State. He may well be the best lawyer in the State. He is the best-qualified person to become Chief Justice. Arguably this is the best appointment to that position in nearly 40 years.

Brian Cowen is not the best-qualified person to become Minister for Foreign Affairs. There are at least three others on the Government benches who are better qualified: Mary O'Rourke, who doesn't want the job, and Desmond O'Malley and Liz O'Donnell who are in the wrong party.

Unlike Ronan Keane, Brian Cowen has no known expertise relevant to the position to which he is due to be appointed. He has had no known interest in it and no track record. Of course, he is capable of absorbing a brief, but why should that be good enough for a position that requires some specialist knowledge and at least a few thought-out opinions on major international issues?

Brian Cowen is not the best appointment to the position of Foreign Minister for 40 years, but neither is he the worst. But why should there be regard to appointing the best possible person for senior judicial office and such little regard to such criteria in appointing the person who is to represent the State's interests and convictions abroad?

The answer is that it is believed it doesn't matter who represents us abroad, provided they reflect the State's essential interests within the European Union, keep on the right side of the Americans, do not embarrass us socially and turn up on time for crucial Dail votes when there isn't a pair. Northern Ireland hardly matters because that is looked after by the Taoiseach's office and, anyway, Liz O'Donnell can be trusted to keep policy on that on an even keel.

There are a few issues, however, might seem to require a little more than that.

The issues of enlargement and institutional reform are immediate concerns, and the State's preoccupation seems simply to boil down to ensuring, if possible, that we continue to keep our snout in the European trough.

The issue of democracy within the European Union seems not to rate at all on our agenda. Apparently it doesn't concern us that major decisions affecting the whole of the European Union, including legislative decisions, are taken by the Council of Ministers, without that body being in any way meaningfully accountable to anyone.

The council is not accountable to the European Parliament and, because it operates in secret, is not and cannot be accountable to the national parliaments. Some EU members, notably Scandinavians, are unhappy about this: the State joins the majority who are not a bit unhappy. Wouldn't it be nice if we had a Foreign Minister who thought EU democracy was important?

It would also be nice if our Foreign Minister thought that the undemocratic nature of the United Nations institutions was also unacceptable. Six years ago a high-level working group within the UN was established to recommend how the Security Council, currently dominated by the Americans and at all times at the mercy of a veto by the five permanent members, might be made more representative of the world's population.

This has got nowhere. There was a debate in the General Assembly about this last month and, as far as I can see from the UN web press release on the debate, this State had nothing to say.

There is the little matter of nuclear disarmament about which, at one time when Frank Aiken was foreign minister, we had a lot to say. Now with renewed threats, initiated by the Americans, of a new nuclear arms race (the US is threatening to break the ABM treaty next summer, its Congress having vetoed the Test Ban Treaty a few months ago), it might be appropriate for us to say something about that.

Then there is the issue of Africa. At present, the Security Council is holding a special session on Africa, attended by seven African presidents, to debate what Madeleine Albright characterised as "Africa's first World War", that involving eight countries in and around the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

A ceasefire was agreed there last summer, but it has been widely breached since and now threatens to collapse. Over 21/2 million people have been killed in the Great Lakes region of Africa in the last decade, a multiple of the people who have been killed during the same period in Yugoslavia. The United Nations agreed last summer to deploy 70 ceasefire monitors to the Congo; so far it has managed to deploy only about 55.

A few platitudes were offered by our UN representative, Richard Ryan, about this in a debate at the General Assembly last month, but otherwise not a word. Is it really the case that we are indifferent to such large-scale slaughter? Just as the State is indifferent to flagrant breaches of international law in the bombing of Yugoslavia last year and the on-going bombing of Iraq? Does our dependence on the British and the Americans for the survival of the Northern Ireland peace process deprive us of all capacity for even mild disparagement of their depredations worldwide?

For reasons that went unexplained so far as I am aware, a decision was taken some time ago to seek a UN Security Council seat at the end of this year. What possible reason would an African country, for instance, have for voting for us as a member of the Security Council? What have we done in the realm of foreign affairs in the last decade to recommend us for such position?

It might be that Brian Cowen's bedtime reading has had all to do with international affairs these last several years while stuck in the Department of Health. It might be that so troubled has he been by the world's injustice that he has had difficulty in getting to sleep and that this accounts for his customary truculence. But it seems unlikely.

Brian Cowen gets the Foreign Affairs portfolio because it is not the Health portfolio, because he thinks it represents a promotion and because Bertie Ahern thinks he owes him one.

email: vbrowne@irishtimes.ie