The report issued by Action from Ireland (AFrI) establishes for the first time that there are links between a number of Irish companies and the international arms trade. These links it should be said, are negligible by international standards and mainly confined - in the Republic at least - to products which can be used for civilian and military uses.
These dual use items have, the report states, been used in countries such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia and may have been used by the military regime in Indonesia, whose annexation of East Timor took place twenty years ago this month and whose repression of the population in that region continues.
Ireland's attitude to the arms trade has traditionally been one of clean hands. According to the White Paper on Foreign Policy, this country has no indigenous arms industry and thus no economic dependence on arms exports. Even in the light of the AFrI report, this statement can be considered to be true, but that truth may depend on a mere technicality.
Among the items detailed by AFrI as having been exported from Ireland are armoured vehicle technology, gun turret components, radar equipment and avionics. Modern military hardware relies on modern technological products, hardware and software. It needs products ranging from common nuts, bolts and washers, to microchips and computer programmes.
This country's advances in computer technology have led an economic revival; they also carry with them the danger that their end products may be used for sinister purposes in distant corners of the Global Village in which we live and to which we contribute.
At present the exporters of all dual use products must provide an end user certificate which specifies the final destination of the exported material. The system is not foolproof. It does, however, place an obligation on the manufacturer to declare its intentions as to the destination of material which can be used for repressive purposes. Should the material be discovered in a place other than that specified, investigations can then be made.
The AFrI report is timely in that it comes when the United States Senate and members of the European Parliament are working on complementary codes of conduct to preclude arms exports to countries which are undemocratic, do not respect human rights, are engaged in armed aggression and do not participate fully in the new UN register of conventional arms.
The report also serves the important purpose of providing information on a subject on which the Government has, up to now, been silent. The arms trade can be a dirty business. Ireland's hands must not only be clean, they must be seen to be so.