The involvement of the Western European Union on the EU's behalf in Kosovo mine removal operations and in police training in Albania was welcomed yesterday by the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Andrews.
Speaking to a meeting of WEU Foreign and Defence ministers in Rome yesterday, Mr Andrews also emphasised the need to complement the EU's Amsterdam Treaty-based security structures with the political determination needed to ensure their effective use.
Mr Andrews and the Minister for Defence, Mr Smith, were observers at the six-monthly ministerial Council of the WEU, the organisation which brings together NATO's European members. Ireland has maintained for some years both diplomatic and military representation in the WEU through its Embassy to Belgium.
The mine removal operation, the first to be carried out on the EU's behalf, presages the new relationship between the two organisations brought about by the yet to be ratified Amsterdam Treaty.
It provides for the Union to subcontract security operations of a peacekeeping or humanitarian nature, so called "Petersberg" tasks, to the WEU. Yesterday's meeting concentrated on the practicalities of implementing that relationship in the face of continually emerging new challenges like that in Kosovo.
Mr Andrews's speech, given only days after he signalled a new willingness to consider involvement by Ireland in NATO's Partnership for Peace programmes, takes up themes which Mr Smith stressed last week at the first meeting of EU defence ministers in Vienna.
Significantly, both men seemed determined to show that Irish security policy, although ostensibly neutralist, is both based on active engagement in the European collective security issues of the day, and is complementary, rather than hostile, to that of NATO.
Mr Andrews yesterday stressed the need for co-operation between Europe's several security organisations, whether the WEU, NATO or the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. All three will work side by side in Kosovo.
The Minister also said the EU needed to develop approaches to security which covered all aspects of conflict, from underdevelopment to human rights, refugee crises and post-conflict reconstruction. "Our priority should be to ensure that the treaty's mechanisms for peacekeeping and crisis management can be used to best effect," he said.
