Professor Ben Tonra:

Mr. Noel Dorr and I and two others edited the first book on Irish foreign policy. It is used in many Irish universities and we had contributors from universities across the island of Ireland. Within the university sphere and in my school, the focus on states other than the large states is a clear view of what we do and how we do research.

In terms of the UN architecture, we have had a debate about the composition of UN Security Council. It was a creature of the winning combination at the end of the Second World War. We have had many debates, panel reports and discussions about amending and extending its membership but one can see no prospect of that occurring. The attributes of the UN Security Council, as it is, are that it has the kind of credibility and authority that Mr. Dorr was talking about. However, that credibility and authority ebbs away as we see how unbalanced the UN Security Council is but I see no prospect of the political deal to change that in the short or medium term.

The question about the OSCE is very good. It comes down to the fact that the OSCE is an early warning network. If people do not hear about it, it is working well. It is the prevention side of diplomacy for states around a table to raise questions about security, to have diplomatic missions and to have negotiations in a more low-key framework. The OSCE has a role and it comes out of the Cold War but it has a contemporary role. We see an enormous amount of activity on the part of the OSCE in central and eastern Europe and elsewhere. Its value is less well-known than it should be, even though when security gets very difficult we turn off into the United Nations, NATO or the European Union.