European military air chiefs are holding a three-day meeting in Ireland for the first time, which will be dominated by the fall-out from the September 11th attacks in the US, it has emerged.
The 20 top-ranking commanders, including a Royal Air Force representative, meet in private every six months under the European Air Chiefs' Conference (Eurac) umbrella.
The conference is being hosted by the head of the Air Corps, Brig Gen John O'Brien, followed by a private dinner tonight in Farmleigh in Phoenix Park.
Ireland's participation in Eurac, which was never formally announced, began when Brig Gen O'Brien's predecessor, Brig Gen Pat Cranfield, started to attend meetings in the mid-1990s.
Last night the Greens MEP, Ms Patricia McKenna, said the meeting "drives a coach and four through the Government's attempts to get a neutrality declaration from the EU."
The presence of officers from other neutral countries made no difference. "There was a feeling that neutral countries would create a bloc when they came into the EU. But they just got sucked in," she declared. Rejecting charges that the hosting of the conference compromised Irish neutrality, a Defence Forces spokesman said: "This is an informal group. It has no status in any military sense."
Besides Brig Gen O'Brien and the RAF representative, the meeting will be attended by air chiefs from Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey.
Eurac was created in 1993 when 17 air chiefs began to meet "to encourage solidarity through collaboration and friendship among the participating countries, while guaranteeing top-level co-operation in the field of military aviation", according to an internal document.
In 2000 the air chiefs reviewed the military lessons learned from the 1999 Kosovo conflict, including the need for "greater scrutiny" of European defence, in a paper issued to European parliamentarians and civil servants.
Highlighting their "key objectives", the military chiefs said there was a need for European forces to use similar military equipment and to co-operate together more frequently.
"We will look to find and promote how more appropriate and timely agreements could be put in place. Cost-effective use of limited resources such as multi-role aircraft, precision-guided munitions and reconnaissance has also to be considered, as is enhancing capability through the pooling of support assets like tactical and strategic airlift and air-to-air refuelling aircraft," the document read.
Following the EU's late-1999 decision in Helsinki to set up the Rapid Reaction Force, Eurac met and agreed on the need for greater co-operation on training and exercises and common tactics.
In addition, the air chiefs said that European air forces should pool heavy lift aircraft, such as the Hercules C-130s, in some operations.
They should also share air-to-air refuelling aircraft.
In an address to a Eurac meeting in 2001, Air Marshal Sir Timothy Garden, of the Centre for Defence Studies at King's College, London, argued that some were mistakenly leaping ahead to an EU army.
"Indeed, the Helsinki proposals are in danger of trying to achieve this step, which remains impossible unless the EU becomes a much more politically integrated entity," he said.
"In the near term, i.e. the next five years, it would be much more productive to look for opportunities to rationalise forces in being which can be operated more efficiently on multilateral or EU-wide talks," he went on.