The spokesman for the British Foreign Secretary - normally the master of diplomatic ambiguity - was unusually candid when asked by journalists after a recent summit: "Do we know any more about the substance of your joint defence initiative?" "God, I hope not," he replied.

The mandarins of our own Department of Foreign Affairs are also masters of diplomacy, for when asked last week about their reaction to the bombing of Iraq, they replied "We regret that it was not possible for the work of the UN inspectorate to be completed and we're disappointed that a peaceful resolution could not be reached."

Speaking later, the Minister, Mr Andrews, added that Iraq should comply with UN Security Council decisions and that it would be preferable if civilian casualties were avoided and the crisis was resolved by peaceful means.

Allow me to decode: "We're not really sure about the legality or political advisability of the attacks, which certainly conflict with our often-expressed policy that all such actions should be specifically sanctioned by the UN Security Council. But we don't want to offend our friends, the US and the UK. Please don't press me on the point."

And we've heard it all before. Only a couple of months ago while our EU allies prepared a military strike against Slobodan Milosevic over Kosovo, officials hid behind similar formulations, obfuscating on whether such a strike had been properly mandated by the Security Council.

Forget abstruse academic arguments about neutrality, positive, proactive or whatever. This is the real world and this is the reality of Ireland's international security position in the raw. Faced with real moral dilemmas all we can do is mumble meaningless formulae even when, as I suspect, the Minister may personally be convinced of the case for threatening Milosevic with force.

Yet Ireland is campaigning for election in 2000 to the Security Council. Why? And if elected what would we do with our vote?

One answer might be that we could use the opportunity of an election to argue for radical reforms in the way the UN works - or, more precisely, doesn't work.

Irish security policy is based on the idea of collective global security exercised through the UN rather than the actions of self-appointed world policemen, whether individual nations or military alliances.

The problem is credibility. The UN is often incapable of acting because of the vetoes of the big powers or through lack of resources - financial or military. When it does act there is often the suspicion among smaller countries that the UN has become the tool of imperialist powers used only where their interests require it.

In creating the United Nations out of the ashes of the League of Nations a number of key lessons were learned. Above all, the UN has a legitimacy that comes from near-universal membership. But, in restricting the veto to a small number of powerful nations - the five permanent members of the Security Council - there was an attempt, only partially successful, to avoid the dead hand of veto voting that made the League incapable of acting.

The UN's structure is a balance between an aspiration to giving an equal voice to each of the nations of the world and the pragmatic acknowledgement that great powers will be reluctant to surrender their sovereignty to a General Assembly of 180, dominated by small and medium-sized powers.

Ireland has for some years supported reform of the Security Council through limited expansion of the council and of its permanent membership to bring in a better balance of regional interests - Brazil, Japan, Germany and India, among others have strong cases for inclusion.

And it "does not favour extending the use of the veto and supports efforts to confine its potential use by existing permanent members to the imposition of sanctions and other enforcement measures under Chapter VII of the Charter".* We also support greater consultation between the Security Council and the general membership of the UN to improve the legitimacy of operations.

Yet is it not possible in the post-Cold War era to look again at the veto issue more radically? Not to abolish it entirely - clearly impossible if the UN is to retain the allegiance of the big powers - but to mitigate its effects and to do so in a way that enhances the UN in the eyes of the majority of member-states.

That could be done by allowing a veto from one of the permanent five to be overturned by what in the EU would be called a "super-qualified majority", a vote of, say, 80 per cent of the member-states in the General Assembly. Two vetoes might require 90 per cent.

Such a process could enhance both the capacity of the UN to take difficult decisions about military action and the legitimacy of the UN in the eyes of the mass of its membership currently excluded from such decisions.

The problem lies in overcoming the reluctance of the Big Five to concede even such limitations on their veto and then, implicitly, to confine their future military adventures to explicitly sanctioned operations. And yet the prize, an effective UN and a move towards a global rule of law, would surely make the price worth paying.

The security challenges facing the international community since the end of the Cold War have changed significantly from preventing interstate conflicts to crisis management in proliferating internal conflicts. Our definition of the requirements of collective security now extends beyond simply guaranteeing the integrity of nation states to preventing humanitarian disasters, beyond the confines of the defence of man-made borders to the protection of universal values.

If we want to play a credible and constructive role in the new order, then Ireland should be seen to promote the institutional changes necessary to meet those challenges. Our campaign for membership of the Security Council should be used as an opportunity to put flesh on the noble but currently impotent aspiration for global collective security at the heart of our foreign policy.

If, on the other hand, we have nothing meaningful to say about the great issues of our day, we should let someone else take the seat.

Challenges and Opportunities Abroad - White Paper on Foreign Policy. Department of Foreign Affairs, 1996.