FAMAGUSTA; Nicosia; Limassol; Larnaca. An island shaped like a chicken leg with a bite out of it. A mountain in the middle of it called Mount Olympus, which, I was later disappointed to discover, was not the home of the gods. A main road which seemed to circle around one part of the island, leaving the bony bit of the chicken leg isolated, as if nobody ever bothered to go there. The map of Cyprus hung on our sitting room wall for years and years, imprinted on a white plate edged in gold. Thousands of Irish families must have been given the same souvenir plate by relations who served, as my mother's brother did, with the United Nations in Cyprus.
It is difficult, then, to identify with the calls' heard with increasing frequency in the run up to the EU Inter Governmental Conference that is supposed to decide on a common EU defence policy, for Ireland to start accepting its responsibilities in the world. The world neither begins nor ends with Europe, and Ireland has been playing an honourable part in it through the UN since 1960. Young Irishmen have given their lives in the Congo and in Lebanon, and risked them all over the world for peace and human rights.
Yet, in spite of such sacrifices, there is a vague feeling of shame clinging to any debate about Irish neutrality. It stems not from the reality of the Irish contribution to international security over the last 35 years, but from the gap we know to exist between what we have said to our European partners and what we actually want and intend for ourselves. The whole issue the Government finally has to face this year - the relationship between Irish neutrality on the one hand and Irish membership of the EU on the other - has been clouded by double speak.
As far back as 1962, when Ireland was first attempting to join what was then the European Economic Community, Sean Lemass made what appeared to be a commitment to join Nato as well. "We recognise," he told the New York Times, "that a military commitment will be an inevitable consequence of our joining the Common Market and ultimately we would be prepared to yield even the technical label of our neutrality. We are prepared to go into this integrated Europe without any reservations as to how far this will take us in the field of foreign policy and defence."
And that position has been essentially repeated by Taoisigh ever since: whenever an "integrated Europe" arrived we would no longer be neutral. To a political culture steeped in such phrases as "pending the reintegration of the national territory", formulae tripped easily off the tongue. The French or the Germans can hardly have been expected to understand that statements about what we would or would not do in the event of a United Europe were as shallow, and as meaningless, as statements about what we would and would not do in the event of a United Ireland.
WE may not be actually on the brink of an integrated Europe, but the process of political union is now reaching a point of no return, and the Inter Governmental Conference is, for Irish neutrality at least, a day of reckoning. We go into it knowing that we have been economical with the actualite and therefore inclined to be defensive. But it is very important that we remember that when it comes to real issues of international security, as opposed to the shifty ambiguities of our stated position on neutrality, we have a lot less to be defensive about than many of our partners.
We have never, for instance, threatened anyone with weapons of mass destruction, as Britain and France have done by maintaining nuclear arsenals that could only be used by committing large scale war crimes. We have never shown the kind of contempt for the sovereignty of weaker nations or for the global environment that France has continued to show in its recent nuclear tests.
We have never sold equipment for electric shock torture to tyrannical regimes, as Britain has, done. We haven't manufactured landmines meant to go on killing children and adults long after a conflict has ended, or placed weapons of great destructive capacity in the hands of murderous regimes.
We have been guilty of our hypocrisies and haverings, and at least some of our virtues come merely from being a small and marginal State on the sideline of the big geopolitical games. But we are not the ones who have made words such as a "security" a sick joke in the mouths of the wretched of the earth.
WHEN the Government publishes its position paper for the Inter Governmental Conference next week, we should keep this in mind. Of course we need to rethink neutrality. Of course we have to stop the double speak and make our minds up about where precisely we fit into the architecture of European security. But we have a perfect right to make our minds up about neutrality on the basis of moral principles that have not, in our case, been so adulterated by persistent hypocrisy as to become meaningless.
Those principles include a refusal to be militarily allied to countries who possess and insist on maintaining weapons of mass destruction, who arm torturers and tyrants, and who decline to allow human rights to interfere with the pursuit of greed.
Those principles make membership of Nato or of the Western European Union, as they are constituted now and for the foreseeable future, impossible. But, as the Institute of European Affairs's paper on the Inter Governmental Conference points out, security policy has three components - the prevention of conflicts, the management of international crises, and the deterrence of potential adversaries - and only one of them involves military alliance.
Ireland, like the other four EU member countries which are not members of the WEU, is willing and able to play a part in the prevention of wars. It is willing and able to play a part in the management and resolution of conflicts. Just because it is unwilling to join with nuclear powers in a military alliance, it is not therefore refusing to contribute to European security.
On the contrary, it is helping to expose the lie that the security of Europe can be founded on the threat of crimes against humanity and on the freedom to cosy up to whatever criminal regimes happen to be buying arms from our partners at any given time.