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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
PB April 2023 April 2023 75
transitions
UN Resolution 2594 imposes a requirement that
when UN peacekeeping missions are at the
strategic planning stage, provision should be
made for their reconfiguration to include local
actors and stakeholders. This resolution aims to
secure the hard-won gains of peacekeeping
missions through, what has historically proven to
be, the dangerous handover from UN
administrators to national authorities. It seeks to
target the inequities that have bedeviled previous
UN sanctions that have caused harm to innocent
civilians in target countries, often themselves the
victims of the regimes targeted. It remains to see
what their impact will be in practice.
The renewal of the UN mission in Bosnia (Althea)
and of its humanitarian programme in
Northwestern Syria, delivered by a cross-border
humanitarian operation from southern Turkey
which Simon Coveney visited twice.
He told the IIEA in December 2022:
“I sat with the people who work with these
communities on a day to day basis. They were
hard-won votes in the face of determined
opposition...sometimes our work was less about
advancing priorities and more about advancing
the line”.
However much they are to be welcomed, these
endeavours merely maintain the status quo ante
and do not advance the resolutions of the
underlying conflicts in any way.
Climate Security
The centre-piece of Irish diplomacy for two years
was the push to make Climate Security a feature
of the UN’s agenda. In previous UNSC terms,
Estonia had met with success in doing something
similar in the realm of Cyber Security. However, the
Irish eorts were frustrated by Russia’s and
China’s insistence that the UNSC should only deal
with issues of “hard security” and they vetoed the
Irish initiative.
Beyond those limited successes, Irish diplomacy
has been limited to well-intentioned speeches and
press releases. Speaking at a panel discussion at
the Royal Irish Academy, the current Ambassador
of Ireland to the United Nations, Fergal Mythen,
distinguished between private diplomacy and
public advocacy and characterised Ireland’s term
on the UNSC as one where personal interventions
and agile diplomacy had achieved low-key
successes in refining and shaping technical
aspects of UNSC resolutions.
It is a measure of the desperation to show some
positive return for our eorts that Ambassador
Our campaign for the
coveted UNSC berth
unflaggingly overinflated
Ireland’s likely impact
T
he enthusiastic ambition with which
Ireland started its two-year term on the
United Nations Security Council, (UNSC)
contrasts with the weary resignation
with which that term finished. The
listless valedictory lap through which the Irish
foreign-policy establishment limped in the final
weeks of our time on the UNSC was, however,
unusual for its clear-eyed self-reflection.
Ocial expectations when we first put ourselves
forward for an elected seat were cautiously
optimistic. There was more than a hint of
unjustified national self-satisfaction in the
sanguine official statement released on 26
November 2019, that “we [Ireland] can look back
with pride at our achievements in engaging,
influencing and shaping global ideas“. Moreover
it animated our campaign for the coveted UNSC
berth which unflaggingly overinflated Ireland’s
likely impact.
On 22 January 2021, just three weeks into
Ireland’s term on the UNSC, then Minister of
Foreign Aairs, Simon Coveney, sketched out to
the Institute or International and European Aairs
the pressing problems for Ireland and the UN at
UNfulfilled
ambitions
Ireland’s two years on the Security Council
added little special and our diplomats should
perhaps be more modest
By J Vivian Cooke
INTERNATIONAL
that time. He ranked Ireland’s priorities as seeking
to resolve the crises in:
• Syria;
• Iran’s nuclear programme;
• Libya;
• Yemen;
• Israel;
• Sudan/South Sudan;
• Ethiopia;
• Climate change;
• International law.
Then, almost as an afterthought, North Korea,
the Great Lakes region , Myanmar and Ukraine.
Some of the conflicts that Ireland prioritised are
genuinely intractable, but there are straightfor ward
paths - that are universally acknowledged among
UNSC members - to resolution of the humanitarian
disasters in places such as Yemen, Libya and
Myanmar. Shamefully for the UN and Ireland no
discernible improvement has been achieved in any
of these areas The situation in almost every single
one is worse.
24 months later, the list of achievements put
forward by Irish diplomats whenever asked is
depressingly modest and largely excludes these
former priorities:
Resolution 2594 on UN Peacekeeping
76 April 2023 April 2023 PB
Mythen felt obliged to pass o the skills of the Irish
delegation in drafting resolutions to include a
rearmation of the words and sentiments of the
UN’s foundational documents and purpose as a
success.And Simon Coveney told the IIEA:
“Maintaining language in a resolution may not
seem like much of an achievement – not to mind
something that takes hours, days, weeks,
sometimes months of work.But I can not overstate
the extent of the pushback against long
established language, norms and principles that
we have seen in our two years on the Council”. It’s
not enough in our disunited nations.
The problem is that, no matter the quality of our
diplomacy, Irish foreign policy within the
multilateral rules-based international order now
operates under two geo-political constraints: one
which did not exist and the other which was not
recognised, in 2020. Irish foreign policy continues
to struggle to recalibrate itself to these new
realities.
The first, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has
transformed the global strategic environment.
Ambassador Mythen reports that there is a
palpable tension in the Security Council chamber
that replicates the animosity and cleavages
experienced during Cold War and which would:, he
said, “not get better anytime soon”.
The impassioned speech of Kenya’s
Ambassador, Matin Kimani, to the UNSC on 21
February 2022, in defence of both Ukraine and the
international order based on the rule of law, which
he framed as essential to Kenya’s international
relations, was exceptional coming from a country
from the Global South. There is a palpable sense
of Ukraine Fatigue among countries; predominantly
among African and Asian states which are formal
or observer members of the Non-Aligned
Movement. Although Russia could only get four
votes (Belarus, Syria, North Korea and Eritrea) to
support it opposing in the General Assembly
Resolution ES-11/12022, 47 such countries
abstained or were not present. Governments
representing some of the world’s most populous
countries, China, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan,
Ethiopia and Vietnam, refused to be drawn on the
Ukraine conflict that they view as essentially a
European issue.
India and South Africa adopted an ocial
stance that was inoensively impartial: “India is
on the side of peace” and South Africa declared
itself to be “ready to support the peaceful
resolution of conflicts”. Pakistani diplomacy
expressed the underlying sentiment far more
bluntly: “We do not want to be part of any camp”.
Trade between these (actually) neutral countries
and Russia has increased over the past year
undermining western sanctions.
Since the initial vote, some supporters have
softened their opposition to Russia, most notably,
the Erdogan regime in Turkiye which has
characterised Russia’s actions as “a policy based
on provocations”.
This is not to say that Ireland’s foreign policy in
relation to the Ukraine is in any way incorrect. It is
only to make the often-overlooked observation
that many countries around the world do not share
the view accepted in Europe that the Russian
invasion as an existential threat. The Ukraine is a
European Crisis and not a global one. Ireland did
not address this.
The second condition constraining Irish foreign
policy is the fact that we must engage in
international relations as wealthy white Europeans
– something that we, as a nation, have diculty in
accepting.
Ireland and European states generally have no
adequate response to the Global South’s
accusation of hypocrisy and double standards,
when so many conflicts have been ignored and
immeasurable suering endured merely because
they occurred in regions geographically remote to
the West in which Europe and America have no
strategic interests. How, these countries are
entitled to ask, has the EU been able to mobilise
its immense resources to house millions of
Ukrainian refugees at such short notice when it
has left black and brown refugees to languish in
penury and neglect for decades leaving poorer
countries such as Turkey, Pakistan and Lebanon
to shoulder the burden.
Any sense Ireland has of common history with
the post-colonial states in Africa and Asia is not
shared by them. Similarly, the claim made by
Coveney while addressing the United Nations
General Assembly on 28 September 2018: “We
think independently. Our path is our own. We bring
no partisan agenda to the table” has yet to be
proved yet alone rendered relevant.
Our much-vaunted neutrality counts for very
little on the international stage.
This has always been the case historically.
Ireland’s membership of the UN had been vetoed
by the USSR, not because, as some advocates of
Ireland joining NATO erroneously claim, we were
neutral during World War 2, but because the
Soviets assessed us to be pro-American. Our entry
to the UN in 1955 was part of a compromise that
sought to maintain the Cold War equilibrium by
balancing the membership of Eastern European
communist states with Western European
capitalist states.
It is an assessment that was confirmed by then
Ambassador Geraldine Byrne Nason’s statement
in the Security Council on 21 February 2021:
“Ireland, along with our European Union partners,
supports a clear and unequivocal response to this
violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty”.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made the UN’s
dicult task impossible.
Ultimately the failings of Ireland’s term on the
UNSC are mainly attributable to that body itself.
However, Ireland needs to take responsibility for
the gap between its vaunted ambition and its
paltry legacy.
What cannot be acknowledged in polite
conversation in Iveagh House is that Ireland’s
contribution was not special or unique and the
same outcomes would have been reached had
Canada not Ireland secured the surprisingly hotly
contested seat.
Rarely do those with a professional interest in
Irish foreign policy ask if the slim results are worth
all the eort. Inevitably at all the colloquia and on
all the round tables the answer was, on balance,
Ireland made a small net positive contribution to
the world.
Either our delivery needs to start reflecting
appropriate results or our diplomats need to start
reflecting appropriate modesty.
Ireland and Europe have
no response to the Global
South’s accusation of
hypocrisy when so many
conflicts have been ignored
and immeasurable suffering
endured merely because
they occurred in regions
remote to the West in which
it had no strategic interests
