Give us a system that will guarantee that exports from Ireland do not end up fuelling massacres in Africa and beyond, writes Sean Love.
About a million people have been killed, on average, in each of the last three years in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the armies of Zimbabwe, Rwanda and Uganda grow rich on the pickings from diamond fields and gold mines. The crisis is far from unique.
Pick almost any conflict situation in Africa, Asia and the Americas and what do you see? A vicious battle for control of natural resources and a very profitable arms trade.
Much of Ireland looks at these foreign tragedies with bemused indifference. Many people put the problems down to bad government, corruption or even an innate propensity to violence.
War fatigue has taken root in much of the Irish public. Reports of another African massacre? Switch the telly over, or quickly turn the page. It's the same old story. Seen it all before, nothing to do with us.
Except it has. These conflicts depend on the flow of arms and military equipment. Africa is awash with weapons of all shapes and sizes supplied by the US, Britain, France and Germany, with Israel and South Africa emerging as new players. Promising newcomers to the game include the Republic of Ireland.
Since 1997 we have exported €240 million worth of military goods and €23.7 billion of dual-use goods.
It would be nice to think that, statistically, military goods are an insignificant proportion of total exports or that the dual-use stuff is only components, only a small proportion of which need concern us.
But take a closer look at some of the equipment being shipped from these shores, including digital telephone systems. Sounds innocuous enough, right? But when they come complete with gadgets to facilitate phone-tapping, tracing of mobile phones, pagers and fax machines and gizmos to interfere with e-mail, they seem more worrying.
Not least if they are used to track and target pro-democracy activists. Amnesty International is currently working on behalf of prisoners of conscience in China jailed simply for accessing human rights information on the web.
We have also campaigned against the transfer of US-supplied AH-64 Apache attack helicopters to both Israel and Turkey because of concerns about human rights abuses by the Turkish and Israeli military forces.
An essential part of the Apache helicopter, the data bus system, is described by the company as "the lifeline of the aircraft". It is made in Ireland.
When we wrote to the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment to ask what export code this product would be listed under, we were told that the company knows its own products best so we should contact the company.
Ireland also manufactures battlefield communications systems, triggers for Tomahawk missiles and computers for the management of missile systems. Where does it all end up? The truth is we don't know because there is no real tracking system, and it's relatively easy for arms-dealers to operate here.
In August 2000 Leonid Minin was arrested in Italy on suspicion of illegal arms-trafficking to some of the most brutal regimes in Africa, including the Revolutionary Front in Sierra Leone. In December 2000 the UN Panel of Experts reported that Minin was responsible for delivering 68 tons of weapons to Sierra Leone via Burkina Faso and Liberia. Minin was also registered as a director of a shelf company in Dublin.
Last year details emerged of illegal arms shipments from Moldova to Sierra Leone organised by two Chechen brothers. Part of the money from this deal ended up in the bank account of a Dublin-registered company involved in the leasing of the aircraft through another subsidiary.
The key player in this was a former KGB man, Victor Bout. So two of the most notorious international arms-dealers, both mentioned in UN reports, had trading links to Ireland. These two cases only came out by accident as by-products of other investigations.
No one really knows how many arms brokers operate out of Ireland, or how many deals they are responsible for, because there is simply no legislation covering this area. Meanwhile, discussions on EU regulations to control arms-brokering drag endlessly on in Brussels, and the arms trade carries on as normal.
The UK is drafting legislation on brokering, but because this applies only to activity carried out on British territory, we are faced with the absurd situation that UK arms-brokers can bypass the law by flying to Dublin or Cork and operating from here.
Despite this, the Government still clings to the myth that Ireland does not have an arms trade in the "conventional sense" and that human rights are at the heart of Irish foreign policy.
Instead of hiding behind this absurdity, why not just give us a system that will guarantee exports from Ireland do not end up fuelling massacres in Africa and beyond?
Sean Love is executive director of the Irish section of Amnesty International