Why the turnabout on PfP, Mr Ahern?

The Government's decision to join NATO's PfP is a significant step away from our traditional policy of non-membership of military alliances, and from pursuit of a foreign policy sufficiently independent to allow us to maintain neutrality.

The fact that the Taoiseach and the Fianna Fail leadership are taking this step without fulfilling their promise to hold a referendum first is a further erosion of standards in public life.

Ireland is the first country to join PfP since NATO violated international law by going to war last March for the first time in its 50-year history, attacking Yugoslavia without a United Nations mandate, when the Kosovo problem could still have been settled peaceably. NATO's air assault was ostensibly aimed at disabling the Serbian army, but at the end of the war we saw that army leave Kosovo virtually unscathed.

What induced the withdrawal was NATO's massive bombing of civilian infrastructure in Yugoslavia itself, again in violation of the Geneva Convention and international law. Such an organisation is an inappropriate partner for a State whose Constitution commits it to the peaceful settlement of international disputes. The Irish armed forces have brought honour to their country round the world for their part in UN peacekeeping operations: should they now enter manoeuvres on behalf of either a US or EU power bloc?

It was Mr Bertie Ahern himself who made the best case for not joining PfP in his speech three years ago, well before NATO broke international law over Kosovo:

"The case for concluding a bilateral pact with NATO under the Partnership for Peace has not been made. It is true that a number of countries have joined, including neutral ones, but they are all situated geographically on either side of the former East-West divide or in the former Soviet Union . . . "While the Government may reassure the public that there are no implications for neutrality - and that may be technically true at this time - it will be seen by other countries as a gratuitous signal that Ireland is moving away from its neutrality and towards gradual co-operation with NATO and the Western European Union in due course.

"It is the thin end of a wedge which will be justified for all sorts of practical reasons and to increase our alleged influence, whereas in reality we will have no influence on Alliance thinking as junior or second-class partners . . .

"We would regard any attempt to push Partnership for Peace or participation in Western European Union tasks by resolution through this House without reference to the people who under our Constitution have the right `in final appeal to decide on all questions of national policy' as a serious breach of faith and fundamentally undemocratic . . ." The puzzle is why Mr Ahern has changed his mind. It is true that there is no constitutional necessity to have a referendum, but Mr Ahern's quotation of Article 6 of the Constitution, under which the Government can put any issue to the people for decision, shows that a plebiscite rather than a constitutional amendment was what he had in mind in 1996. The case for that has not changed.

One consequence of joining PfP will surely be the increased militarisation of Irish public life. The Army top brass have been lobbying to join PfP for some time.

Henceforth, Ireland's armed forces are likely to cost more. We will be standardising our weapons systems with those of our NATO partners, and the military will want to have as good as the best they have. That means more orders from Ireland for the voracious arms industries of the US, France, Germany and Sweden; all "partners for peace" alongside us with NATO, and all arms-sellers in the past to Indonesia, Saddam Hussein and the perpetrators of the genocide in Rwanda.

UN peacekeeping in the Third World, where Ireland has an excellent record, is a low arms-intensive, high manpower-intensive business. Partnership with NATO will call for much more costly equipment.

The use of NATO resources for Europe-led operations is likely henceforth to be the name of the game, as key elements of Ireland's political elite, animated by the uncritical Europhilia they have encouraged here over the past 30 years, prefer to see themselves as helping to run an EU quasi-federal superpower rather than maintaining and expanding the independence of the Irish State.

This phrase, "NATO resources for European-led operations," was endorsed by the NATO anniversary summit in Washington in April and by the EU summit in Cologne in June. It encapsulates US-EU military and security ambitions. The Cologne summit agreed to the development of "the appropriate capabilities and instruments for conducting an EU security/military policy."

It established an EU Council of Defence Ministers, side by side with EU foreign ministers, to co-ordinate military tasks. It agreed to an EU military committee consisting of military personnel, to make recommendations to the former body, as well as an EU Military Staff and Situation Centre, an EU Satellite Centre and Centre for Strategic Studies.

These steps will "lay the foundations for a European Defence Union", said Germany's then EU affairs minister (now EU Commissioner), Mr Gunther Verheugen. A defence union will then complement EMU.

These developments went virtually unnoticed in Ireland because of public concentration on the end of the Kosovo war. But they almost certainly lie behind the Government's unexplained rush to sign up for PfP.

They constitute the next field of struggle between those who wish the Irish State to play an independent role that is consistent with its honourable foreign policy traditions and those who do not.

Anthony Coughlan is senior lecturer in social policy at Trinity College Dublin and secretary of the National Platform organisation