A former Director of Operations in the Army has today taken up his position as head of Nato's Partnership for Peace (PfP) mission (KFor) in central Kosovo.
Brigadier General Gerry Hegarty is the first Army officer to command a multinational task force in the Balkans.
Around 16,000 military personnel from 34 nations is stationed in Kosovo, 221 of whom are Irish Army.
A further 59 personnel are to be deployed as Ireland succeeds Sweden as lead nation at Task Force HQ for one year.
The PfP is of particular international significance because it brings together Nato and non-Nato nations in peace missions.
Ireland's participation has been regarded as compromising our traditional neutrality by Sinn Féin and the Greens while in opposition.
Ireland's remit covers 20 per cent of Kosovo including the capital, Pristina, and over half of the province's 2 million people.
Ireland has contributed troops to Kfor since its arrival in 1999 to maintain peace in the troubled province following the bloody break-up Yugoslavia.
The province is nominally part of Serbia but is UN-run with PfP who went in to protec the majority ethnic Albanians who suffered persecution under the regime of Slobodan Milsoevic. Mr Milosevic died last year in custody while being tried for Kosovo war crimes at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague.
Talks on the future of status of Kosovo began last year under Martti Ahtisaari, the former Finnish president and member of the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning in the North.
His draft resolution document proposing almost full autonomy with measures to protect the minority Kosovo Serbs proved unacceptable to both parties and the ethnic Albanians threatened to declare independence unilaterally.
While the issue of the province's status is unresolved the danger of violence being re-ignited remains.
The situation is generally calm but can turn volatile quickly and KFor are on a permanent state of stand-by for dealing issues which arise in both rural and urban settings.
A Defence Forces spokesman said: "It poses various challenges in a military context. There have been riots in the past and we have dealt with those."
Brig Gen Hegarty, originally from Co Sligo, has served in Lebanon, Macedonia and Team Leader with EU Monitoring Mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina.