MINISTER FOR Foreign Affairs, Micheál Martin, told a high-level United Nations meeting on disarmament yesterday that international action on the issue had been unacceptably slow.
Mr Martin was speaking in New York at a meeting convened by the United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon on Revitalising the Work of the Conference on Disarmament.
Ireland joined the Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament in 1999, but as the Minister told yesterday’s meeting, “the conference has not managed to engage in substantive work for well over a decade . . . the status quo cannot continue”.
Mr Martin told The Irish Timesthat the conference, which is bogged down in procedural wrangling, "is an example of all that is worst in the UN system. It is in urgent need of dramatic reform."
Paralysis at the conference was all the more unacceptable because US president Barack Obama had given a new impetus to disarmament by calling for a world free of nuclear weapons and by concluding a follow-on Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start) with Russia, which would reduce the two countries’ nuclear warhead arsenals from 2,200 to 1,550.
Stagnation at the Geneva-based conference also contrasted with recent Irish successes in disarmament, Mr Martin noted. The Convention on Cluster Munitions, which was adopted in Dublin on May 30th, 2008, entered into force last August 1st.
In May, Irish diplomat Alison Kelly chaired the debate on the Middle East at the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference, overcoming US reluctance to schedule a conference in 2012 on making the Middle East a nuclear-free zone.
Ireland feels a certain paternity for the non-proliferation treaty because former Irish foreign minister Frank Aiken first raised the issue in 1958 and pursued it at the UN through the 1960s, culminating with that treaty’s entry into force in 1970.
At one of the dozen bilateral meetings he held at the UN this week, Mr Martin discussed disarmament with Amr Musa, the secretary-general of the Arab League. The league wants to table a motion at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that would put pressure on Israel to join the non-proliferation regime.
Ireland would not support the Arab League motion, Mr Martin said, because it would compromise progress achieved under Irish leadership at the treaty review conference. “We are saying this could be divisive. It’s moving away from the position we arrived at last May. We created momentum and we would like people to give that a chance,” he said.
On Thursday afternoon, Mr Martin urged the US to fulfill Mr Obama’s pledge to ratify the comprehensive test ban treaty (CTBT), which like the Start Treaty has been blocked by Republicans in the US Senate.
“Ireland has consistently been a proponent of a rules-based global order centred on strong international institutions,” he told a ministerial meeting for promoting the entry into force of the CTBT.
Mr Martin said the treaty aimed “to hamper the development and the qualitative improvement of nuclear weapons” and was “one of the essential pillars in the nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation framework”.
Ireland is one of 182 countries to have ratified the treaty. The greatest obstacle to implementation remains the resistance of nine “annex two” states with civil or military nuclear programmes.
The Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is also in New York for the UN general assembly, said yesterday the Tehran declaration on a nuclear fuel swap between Iran and Turkey offered an opportunity to end the long-running crisis over Iran’s nuclear programme.
Speaking earlier to The Irish Times, Mr Martin said he was "quite pessimistic about the level of engagement from Iran".
On a recent trip to Vienna, where he met Yukia Amano, director-general of the international atomic energy agency, Mr Amano “didn’t pull his punches in terms of the lack of [Iranian] co-operation, lack of engagement”.
As foreign minister, Mr Martin said he had witnessed a “torturous, never-ending dialogue” between Tehran and European and UN diplomats.
“One gets the sense of absolute procrastination, prevarication, no real movement,” Mr Martin said, though he believed sanctions against Tehran were beginning to have an effect.
“I would have to come to the conclusion that there would be a strong desire within the Iranian system to develop a nuclear capability.”
The possibility of an Israeli or US strike on Iranian installations was “the ultimate nightmare that everyone wants to avoid”, Mr Martin added.