Addressing the Foreign Policy Association in New York in September, the Taoiseach labelled the illicit arms trade as "an affront to a world where 1.3 billion people still live on less than $1 a day, where 12 million children die before their fifth birthday, where 34.5 million are infected by the HIV virus, and 13 million AIDS orphans are left to fend for themselves".

The Taoiseach's forthright words deserve to be expanded upon.

This year, more than $800 billion will be spent on military expenditure and the arms trade. This obscene amount could easily provide every man, woman and child on the planet with an income above the poverty line. According to UNICEF calculations, less than 10 per cent of this sum could, in 10 years, educate every child on earth.

It is an absurdity that while the UN Security Council is charged, under the United Nations Convention, with the primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, the five permanent members of the council account for 85 per cent of all weapons exports. China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States not only dominate this trade, they are engaged in bitter competition to increase their share, often in the developing world.

Ireland accepts that there is a need for countries to maintain a limited military capacity for national security and for providing troops and police for our international peacekeeping commitments. The de facto situation today, however, is that the market, not morality, dictates to whom weaponry is sold. It is repugnant to the peaceful ideals upon which the United Nations was built.

It is wrong to deal in arms with corrupt and anti-democratic regimes. It is wrong to fuel civil wars in the developing world by offloading armaments into theatres of conflict.

The vast array of weaponry with which the youth of Iran and Iraq were slaughtered in needless conflict throughout the 1980s came from the military-industrial complexes of the permanent UN Security Council members. It was the West which armed Saddam Hussein and enabled his military advance into Kuwait in 1990.

My brother Niall's record on Iraq is flawless and courageous, and some members of the Oireachtas committee on Foreign Affairs are following in his recent footsteps the day after the Budget this coming week.

More recently, British tanks, armoured vehicles and water cannon were used to suppress pro-democracy demonstrations in Indonesia. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, when the United States and the rest of the "international community" were speaking of the end of tyranny in the Gulf and the former communist worlds, about 70 per cent of all US arms sales was going to developing countries. Of those weapons, almost half went to countries that were not democracies.

Ireland has always stood out against this situation. Once Ireland takes her seat on the UN Security Council at the beginning of the year, hopefully the permanent members will again be under no illusions as to our stance. At all stages of our involvement with the League of Nations, the UN and the EU, all Irish governments have resisted the proliferation of armaments.

While our stance against nuclear weapons is perhaps better known, we should stand to the fore in the movement to limit the proliferation of conventional weaponry.

At EU level, Ireland was prominent in the negotiations which led to the establishment of an EU code of conduct on arms transfers in 1998. Under the code, the states of the EU agreed not to export weapons to countries where there is a "clear risk" that they could be used for internal repression; where they would provoke or prolong armed conflicts; or where they would hamper sustainable development in the recipient country.

As the then Foreign Minister, arising from my own humble input to the discussion, I became entangled with the French Foreign Minister, Hubert Vedrine. He was making the case for how important the arms industry was to France on the employment front.

My point, predictably, was that, employment or not, the industry was immoral and was mainly the cause of what comes out of Africa in terms of terrible hardship in a necklace of countries extending north to south on that magnificent continent. He is a civil fellow and we made it up after the debate, to the point where he offered me a ticket for the World Cup final, which his country subsequently won. Yes - I was there!

The point remains, match or no match, that conventional arms continues to proliferate worldwide despite the code of conduct on the transfer of arms.

We have always regarded the code as incomplete, however, as it is vague in places and ignores the trade in goods which, while not strictly military, are regularly misused by various regimes to suppress their populations. A second phase of negotiations is now under way and it is to be hoped that we can influence our fellow EU member-states to include these items in the code. At present, as already mentioned, it forms little real impediment to the arms trade.

It may be that it will be Ireland's aim to see this reformed code of conduct forms a prototype for other regional codes and, ultimately, as the basis for a global code under UN auspices. The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Cowen, during his speech at the general debate at the recent 55th session of the UN General Assembly, said that "without peace, there can be no development. Without development, peace is hard to sustain."

Now that we have made the concrete commitment to meet the UN target of spending 0.7 per cent of GNP on official development aid, we must redouble our efforts to bring peace and democracy to the developing world through the ending of the arms trade.