With Ireland soon due to vacate the seat it has occupied on the United Nations Security Council for the past two years, Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s speech at the UN General Assembly this week served as bookend to a period of extraordinary activity in Irish diplomacy. Coming just months before he steps down as Taoiseach, it was also a valedictory speech after a two-and-a-half year premiership dominated by global crises.
Martin took office in the middle of a pandemic that would leave millions dead and deal a severe blow to global progress. He will exit the Taoiseach’s office at a time when war is being fought in Europe, a shock that is wreaking havoc on energy prices and food supplies. A constant thread has been the toxic fallout from Brexit and the continuing political instability in Britain.
On most major foreign policy issues, Irish positions cleave closely to those of the European Union. That can lead to lowest-common-denominator stances; there has been justified critcism for years of Dublin’s failure to take a harder line towards Russia, for example. In that case, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine changed everything, and Ireland’s position has evolved along with that of the EU. In New York, Martin labelled Russia a “rogue state”.
What a country of Ireland’s size lacks in hard power it must make up in other ways. Over the past two years, one of the achievements of Irish diplomacy has been to attempt to keep attention on vital issues – in particular food insecurity and the relationship between hunger and conflict – that can easily fall off the global agenda at times like these. Dublin has also taken a welcome activist role on the climate crisis as it affects the developing world. This week, the Government said it would contribute €110 million over three years to new initiatives aimed at tackling disease and child hunger. And Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney has signalled that Ireland’s foreign aid spending will increase in next week’s budget.
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For all the good that can be done through the United Nations, in-built flaws in its design and operation will continue to frustrate serious efforts to solve the world’s most pressing problems. On Israel-Palestine, on the war in Tigray and of course on the criminal slaughter by Russia in Ukraine, the security council veto is a terrible, anachronistic brake on progress. But systems are only as effective – or as ineffective – as those who design and operate them. With political will, courage and a spirit of compromise, serious action could be taken to combat global warming, end hunger, cut global inequality and punish those responsible for war and conflict.
In today’s world that sounds impossibly idealistic. But the alternative – giving up on the UN, or conceding that the era of multilateralism is over – is no alternative at all.