In backing last week's declaration by EU foreign ministers which explicitly endorsed the NATO bombing of Serbia, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Andrews, appeared to step down off the fence. On the face of it, he cast aside all ambiguities in Ireland's neutral position. And he made a major break with the State's long-standing refusal to countenance the use of force outside a UN ambit.
For most, the decision is likely to be seen as a welcome response to a moral imperative in support of beleaguered Kosovans and a possible regrettable, but necessary, break with neutrality in the face of UN impotence. Short of sending troops, the Government could not nail its colours to the mast more clearly.
For others, it will be another symbolic step, along with signing up for Partnership for Peace, on the slippery slope to the emergence of the much talked of "European security identity" and a European defence role for Ireland.
The declaration went significantly beyond that issued at the Berlin summit last month which, in deference to the neutrals, avoided any explicit endorsement of the NATO action with a formula which simply blamed Serbia's President Milosevic for all that was happening to his country, including the bombing.
"In the face of extreme and criminally irresponsible policies and repeated violations of UN Security Council resolutions, the use of severest means, including military action, has been both necessary and warranted," the declaration said. It was approved unanimously, Ireland and three other neutral countries included.
The original draft spoke of the bombing being "justified". It was amended at the instigation of Mr Andrews, who insisted on the substitution of the word "warranted".
He was concerned lest there be any suggestion that the NATO action had been legally sanctioned, notably by the UN Security Council.
Yet, paradoxically, Mr Andrews's amendment makes the declaration all the more remarkable from an Irish point of view.
If the bombing was legally authorised, under an extremely liberal interpretation of previous Security Council resolutions on former Yugoslavia, then Ireland would have had no problem in consistently backing the foreign ministers' resolution.
The core Irish foreign policy principle underlying our support for the UN as the vehicle for global collective security is that the use of force is only permissible if specifically authorised by the Security Council.
If, on the other hand, the action is not legally sanctioned, as the Minister has previously hinted, then Ireland's willingness to give explicit backing to the bombing marks a major diplomatic departure.
For the first time in its history, this State has endorsed military strikes by a major military alliance against a sovereign nation without UN authorisation.
The reluctance of the Government to pin its colours to the mast of a specific interpretation of the current position of international law on the right to act to prevent humanitarian disasters or genocide is in part a reflection of the reality that international law is very much a moving target. The absolute sovereignty of nation-states is no longer the cornerstone of international relations.
The foreign ministers' declaration is a significant admission by Ireland, a candidate for Security Council membership, that this very body, and hence the UN itself, has effectively been sidelined by its unwieldy structure and, most particularly, by the stranglehold of the major powers' veto. Yet the Government has still to articulate any reform programme to remedy that reality.
Significantly, the Fine Gael leader, Mr John Bruton, has not yet been willing to give up on the UN as the vehicle through which collective security should be addressed.
Writing in this paper he demanded "an explanation from the British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, and his French counterpart, Hubert Vedrine, as to why the Rambouillet draft peace agreement provided for the deployment of NATO, and not of UN, troops in Kosovo".
The answer they would give is that it had become clear Russian consent would simply not have been forthcoming. An insistence on the UN role would then simply have been a do-nothing policy.
The Labour leader, although apparently at odds with the party's president, Mr Proinsias De Rossa, has been somewhat more positive about the NATO action. Mr Ruairi Quinn last week told a party seminar that he "agreed with Dessie O'Malley that the prevention of tyranny and genocide should be our starting point".
"I believe that humanitarian concerns should count for more in international law than the absolute sovereignty of states."
He said on the broader picture, and in the context of the new security realities in Europe, "Ireland must begin to articulate its own position and view as to what contribution we can make to the design and implementation of a new security system for the European Union".
Indeed, the PfP debate and the decision by the Government to back the NATO bombing could provide the launching pad for a far wider debate on the issue of collective regional security structures in which the old taboo of neutrality could come under serious questioning.
And that Fianna Fail should launch us down that road is not altogether out of character. In 1967 Frank Aiken, a champion of the idea of universal collective security through the UN, spoke of the need to encourage groups of member-states to organise themselves into "zones of peace", "regions of neutrality" or "areas of law and limited armaments".
That regionalisation of the UN's security function is already beginning to emerge as a reality.
