Thirty-six Irish soldiers have died on United Nations service since 1960. The UN is the appropriate "partnership for peace" for Ireland. Joining NATO's PFP would bring us more costs than benefits.

It represents a fundamental departure from a UN-oriented neutrality policy towards a policy that sees NATO acting as world policeman.

Mr Bertie Ahern, then leader of the Opposition, showed in a Dail speech on foreign affairs on March 28th, 1996 why NATO's PFP was not the place for us:

"The case for concluding a bilateral pact with NATO under the Partnership for Peace has not been made. It is true that a number of countries have joined, including neutral ones, but they are all situated geographically on either side of the former East-West divide or in the former Soviet Union . . . The countries who have joined are all close to potential zones of instability.

"Some are in a half-way house and cannot wait to join NATO as full members. Others want a half-way house between membership of NATO and neutrality, giving them an eachway bet. Yet others, part of the former Soviet Union, have no doubt joined for a mixture of economic and security reasons. Irish membership of PFP will be seen in a different light."

Nothing has changed in the three years since Mr Ahern spoke to justify a policy change. True, Switzerland joined PFP two years ago; but Switzerland, unlike Ireland, is close to the former Iron Curtain and the Balkan instability zone. It has never been a UN member, or contributed to UN peacekeeping.

It conscripts its citizens and maintains a powerful army. Its political establishment has embraced NATO's PFP as a way of reorienting a reluctant public towards deeper international involvements, and EU membership in particular, which Swiss elite opinion wishes to bring about.

What benefits would joining NATO's PFP bring to Ireland?

If the Army lobbyists for PFP are right, we have enough difficulty as it is in meeting our military commitments to the UN without assuming new ones towards NATO. The way spokesmen for Army officers and other ranks have intervened politically through the media to advocate the NATO PFP link should shock democratic, anti-militarist opinion.

Undoubtedly the Army people see themselves as obtaining more sophisticated, and more costly, weapons systems through PFP, plus scope for personal promotion, emoluments, fresh horizons.

It is taxpayers who will foot the bill for more equipment and more soldiers. The £40 million allocated last April for 10 armoured cars is but a foretaste. The Army's proper role is to be available to act in support of the civil power, and to undertake UN peacekeeping in parts of the world, especially Africa, Asia and the Middle East, where the former colonial powers dislike committing their nationals, but where soldiers and aid workers from neutral, anti-colonial Ireland enjoy special respect.

There are 17 UN peacekeeping missions. Only one, that in Bosnia, is under NATO command, and Ireland and several other countries are involved in it without being in PFP.

NATO today is a redundant relic of the Cold War. Its pretensions to a global policing role stand in the way of a more effective UN and OSCE. It is doubtful if the US government sees Ireland joining PFP as much more than a tidying-up exercise. But for us it opens the prospect of a gradually deepening military involvement in commitments other than UN or OSCE ones. To quote Mr Ahern again:

"While the Government may reassure the public that there are no implications for neutrality - and that may be technically true at this time - it will be seen by other countries as a gratuitous signal that Ireland is moving away from its neutrality and towards gradual co-operation in NATO and the Western European Union in due course. It is the thin edge of the wedge which will be justified for all sorts of practical reasons and to increase our alleged influence, whereas we will have no influence on Alliance thinking as junior or second-class partners."

The end of the Cold War has been a disaster for the arms manufacturers. NATO has to reinvent itself as it approaches its 50th anniversary in April. PFP guarantees lucrative new arms orders as the military staffs of the "partner" countries update and harmonise their weapons to NATO standards.

Broadening NATO's remit outside the North Atlantic, to take in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and the Caspian Basin, extends NATO military/political hegemony in the post-Cold War world, undermining the UN's role as global guarantor of peace.

If NATO's Partnership for Peace can encompass Russia, it will effectively be organising "the White Race in Arms against the rest", Blacks, Arabs and Asiatics, to use the phrase of Martin Walker of the Guardian. Ireland's participation in such a NATO-led political coalition would be symbolically valuable, a useful fig-leaf.

But in reality peacekeeping, peace-enforcement and crisis-management under NATO rather than UN auspices could be fraught with danger, expense and dubious moral purpose for this State. PFP tasks do not require, and can be in breach of, a UN mandate. NATO spokesmen have openly referred to the neutral PFP members such as Austria, Sweden and Finland as the "former" neutrals.

President Clinton in 1996 proclaimed that PFP was "a path to full NATO membership for some and a strong lasting link to the Alliance for all". That is the political reality of PFP. The smooth talk of Irish politicians about our neutrality being unchanged is but an attempt to quell public anxiety.

The end of the Cold War gives Ireland a splendid opportunity to advance the UN, which embraces the world's 200 states, as the best guarantor of international peace, and to urge the US to support properly its peacekeeping efforts. So far, the "debate" on whether we should reorientate ourselves from the UN towards NATO's PFP seems largely to have taken place in Mr Ahern's and Mr Andrews's heads.

Is that good enough for such a shift towards a gradual militarisation of our foreign policy, maybe even domestic policy? Even if a referendum is not constitutionally necessary to enable us join NATO's Partnership for Peace, it is surely politically necessary. Under Article 6 of the Constitution the Government may put any policy issue before the people for decision. The case for doing that in this instance was again put trenchantly by Mr Ahern in 1996:

"We would regard any attempt to push Partnership for Peace or participation in Western European Union tasks by resolution through this House without reference to the people who under our Constitution have the right `in final appeal to decide all questions of national policy", as a serious breach of faith and fundamentally undemocratic."

Fianna Fail's 1997 general election manifesto stated: "We oppose Irish participation in NATO itself, in NATO-led organisations such as Partnership for Peace, or in the WEU beyond observer status."

The Taoiseach's thinking on NATO's PFP may have evolved, but the case he has made for letting the people decide it by referendum is as valid now as it was then.

Anthony Coughlan is senior lecturer in social policy at Trinity College, Dublin. He is secretary of the National Platform organisation