Ireland cannot be neutral on keeping the peace

MY FRIEND Sasha has a demanding and important job. He stitches up knife wounds, extracts bullets, plasters the limbs of those injured by plastered drivers and generally deals with the accidents and incidents of the night in a city of 12 million people. Moscow's burgeoning crime rate has increased his work load considerably and at times the emergency section of the Sklifosovsky Hospital, known to Muscovites affectionately as the "Sklif", resembles a scene from the TV series M*A*S*H.

The older part of the hospital dates from the time of its main benefactors, the Sberemetyevs, who were the richest family in Tsarist Russia, "owning" tens of thousands of serfs. However, things have changed and many of Russia's richest families now come from the classes who have inserted the stab wounds and the bullets into the patients who Sasha attempts to heal.

Sasha often expresses the wish that he could come to Ireland for a relaxing holiday, but although almost all Russians are now free to travel abroad, he is not permitted to go to the West.

During his national service as an army doctor, Sasha was based for some time in that country which used to be known as Czechoslovakia, and because of the geographical and military knowledge he gained there a directive forbidding him to visit "enemy territory" remains in force from the Cold War times.

This, he explained to me, was the reason he could not come to Ireland. I, in my innocence, explained to him that Ireland's neutrality should have prevented such a ban and he replied that Ireland might have been neutral in name but everyone, and most especially his military superiors, knew it was a "Western neutral" and not an Eastern one.

The Cold War from the Russian side of things, applied to Ireland as well as to the members of the NATO alliance and, in Sasha's case, apparently it still does. Ireland's neutrality held no water for the USSR and it does not, it would appear, bold very much for the Russian Federation as the Soviet Union's main successor.

Then Ireland was, in the Soviet weltanschauung, a small puppet of the United States of America; it knew that Irish territory could, should the needs of war necessitate it, quickly be overwhelmed by nearby NATO states. It knew this, by the way, because it had become quite adept itself at overwhelming the territory of small countries ever since the day that Vyacheslav Molotov called the Lithuanian ambassador to the Foreign Ministry in Moscow to tell him: "The time of the small nations has come to an end".

IN THOSE days, and right up to the 1990s, of course, neutral" Ireland was an integral part of an economic and social system which was the absolute opposite to that espoused by the Soviet Union and its voluntary and involuntary allies. Today, as the diplomatic banality has it: "our two countries have a great deal in common".

We both have market economies, though one appears to be performing somewhat better than the other, we both have strong traditional cultures which have survived attempts to destroy them and we both, to put it mildly, fancy a drink now and then.

One major difference, which has not struck many people to date, is that Russia is a member of the NATO sponsored Partnership for Peace (PIP) and Ireland is not. We are, it would appear, once again on different sides of the military divide. We, at first sight, are neutral and they are not.

Our neutralists fear that PIP membership would be merely a stepping stone to full membership of NATO, and there are even those who suggest that sending about 50 Irish soldiers to join the NATO led security force (Sfor) in Bosnia, was the very first step on that particular path.

This argument, should it be applied to Russia, would suggest that Moscow, through its PIP membership is already marching to NATO's tune and that the Swiss, for the same reason, are about to abandon a neutrality fare more traditional than Ireland's. Russia's attitude to NATO's eastward expansion would seem to indicate that its PIP membership has not made it an American puppet and if Javier Solana thinks he can soon count on Swiss membership of NATO then he has another think coming.

Ireland and Malta, the anti PIP argument goes, are remaining neutral, while the rest of Europe, by joining the PIP, is preparing to join a military alliance. Another argument could be put forward that, by joining an organisation committed to peace, most of the countries of Europe have become neutral while the Irish and the Maltese have become the warlike ones.

Membership of PIP, it seems to me, could be a stepping stone to membership of NATO only if we want it to be so. The Russians who see NATO as a threat to European security do not want a stepping stone so, for them, it won't be one.

THE SAME applies to Switzerland and to Sweden, whose supreme commander of its armed forces, Gen Owe Wiktorin, has been forceful in his opposition to NATO expansion, but enthusiastic about PIP.

Hopes that the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), of which Ireland and its Maltese allies are members, might provide the basis for Europe's new security structure have faded since the agreement between Presidents Yeltsin and Clinton in Helsinki in March to work towards a treaty governing NATO's relationship with Russia in which the Russians, while remaining outside, would have a say in NATO policy.

Ireland's choices now seem to be to turn its back on European security completely or take on a responsible role by joining PIP, and it would be no harm if, with a general election looming, the Government would make its views perfectly clear to the electorate on the issue.

Those who thought another European war was out of the question after the German surrender 52 years ago this month were rudely awakened by events in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. A possible civil war in Albania threatens Balkan stability again, and Russia has fought its own devastating and costly war in Chechnya in the final years of this century. European security, therefore, is hardly an issue to be ignored, it is, on the other hand, a concept to which all European states should contribute.

But then "contributions", in Ireland's more recent European experience, have been something which other countries make and which Ireland receives.

Neutrality, as far as war is concerned, may have a great deal to offer, but surely there is no place for neutrality on the issue of peace. When the Dail votes on Wednesday to send Irish soldiers to join Sfor in Bosnia it will be a stepping stone towards common sense and responsibility, membership of PIP would be further step in that direction.