Sir, - Following the recent defence agreement between Britain and France, your Editorial of December 7th argued that Ireland should now join Partnership for Peace, which you suggested would put us in a better position to make choices about our "security interests".
This ignores the fact that we haven't yet even begun to think about deciding what those "security interests" might be. Britain and France are moving towards a common defence policy (for us as well as them) which will be to the benefit of their native arms industries. Both are nuclear powers. Although there has been no debate yet in this country about what sort of European foreign and security policy the people of Ireland might feel comfortable with, I think that we can say that it isn't one based on the state subsidising the sale of conventional weapons, or of deploying nuclear ones. Is there any stomach in this country for selling weapons to Indonesia? Or for testing nuclear weapons in the Pacific? Because this looks like the sort of common security policy that Britain and France are giving the lead in.
Rather than joining PfP, moving us closer to military alliance, but allowing NATO to continue to set the military agenda for the EU, is it not perhaps time that we actually decided what sort of foreign and security policy we wish to have? And might we not then engage in discussion with the other neutral EU states on how the whole issue of a common foreign and security policy might progress down a very different path from the one on which Britain and France are already making moves to proceed? - Yours, etc., Conor McCarthy,
Shantalla Road, Galway.