Charlie McConalogue (Donegal North East, Fianna Fail)

I acknowledge the Tánaiste's contribution and his comments in opening this debate. I welcome the opportunity to speak on Ireland's chairmanship of the OSCE. It is an opportunity to reflect upon the progress across Europe in which the organisation has played such a significant role in the past decades. It is also a chance for us to size up the difficulties the OSCE currently faces across the Continent, and consider how best to meet them. Furthermore, it is a moment to discuss and analyse emerging threats and future challenges the OSCE will confront in the coming years.

I point to the strengths of the history of the OSCE in the collapse of communism and the entrenchment of democracy and human rights, its most positive legacy. I also wish to highlight thepersistence of human rights abuses in certain states across the region. We must call upon the governments concerned to ensure that the highest democratic and human rights standards prevail in the spirit of the origins of the OSCE, the Helsinki Accords. These issues and the need to develop forums for inter-state dialogue should inform the goals and priorities of Ireland's chairmanship of the OSCE.

It is difficult for our generation to imagine the background against which the OSCE was created and the leap forward it represented at the time. However, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. The world in 1975 was still dominated by what Marx called "the spectre of communism". Churchill's powerful description: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent", still rang all too true in the 1970s. Under the shadow of the eastern bloc, western Europe had marshalled together to form the EEC. The military NATO alliance provided a nuclear blanket against the Warsaw Pact countries on the other side of the ideological divide. The underlying omnipresent threat was the very real and present danger of nuclear war between east and west. In an effort to escape the politics of perpetual confrontation, the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, CSCE, was created to serve as a multilateral forum for dialogue and negotiation between east and west. Meetings between Brezhnev, his Warsaw Pact allies and western leaders stretched out over a two-year period, flitting between Finland and Switzerland.

The ultimate outcome was the agreement on the Helsinki Final Act, which was signed on 1 August 1975. This document contained a number of key commitments on politico-military, economic and environmental and human rights issues that became central to the so-called Helsinki Process. This was the real beginnings of the OSCE and its central role in the development of Europe. These accords were a seminal moment in the collapse of communism. As the late acclaimed historian,Tony Judt, noted, the Helsinki Accords were a crowbar that prised open the cold prison of Soviet thought. The origins of the OSCE established a language of human rights, one that did not provide a smokescreen for the ossified Soviet regime, as Brezhnev had hoped. Rather, it gave dissidents across Eastern Europe the tools with which to chip away at totalitarianism. Today, the OSCE can draw inspiration from the impact created by the Helsinki Process.

The rise of Solidarity in Poland, the dissent activity of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia and the glasnost policy of Gorbachev all came after the initial impact of the Helsinki Accords. The entrenchment of human rights through the accords played a significant role in the process that culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the ideological chasm that divided and defined post-war Europe. This represents the real strength of the OSCE and its potential in shaping Europe for the better.

The Charter of Paris for a New Europe launched a new era for the CSCE, to play a central role in managing the historic change taking place in Europe and respond to the new challenges of the post-Cold War period. This process saw the establishment of permanent institutions and an ever-evolving role in a dynamic environment that stands in stark contrast to the frozen, binary, political topography of the Cold War era. It is to this utterly transformed political situation I now look.

Security is at the core of the OSCE but we agree with the three-dimensional approach taken by the organisation. In our view, democratisation, as prominent scholars such as Fukuyama and Robert Dahl have pointed out, is inextricably bound up with peace. Democracies are the basis of legitimate government and do not go to war against each other. These twin goals of the OSCE go together, hand in hand. The Irish chairmanship should reflect the idea that free partnerships between free people should be the basis of international relations.

Fianna Fail's political allies in Europe, the ELDR, will meet in Yerevan this weekend following another flawed Armenian election last Saturday. Voters were pressurised into supporting the Government while other parties struggled to compete on an uneven playing field. Reports of widespread interference with the running of polling stations, voters' movement and casting of votes throughout the day by certain political parties have raised serious questions and concerns. The battle for democratisation is still going on in Armenia and across other countries in Europe struggling to come out of the shadow of authoritarianism.

In this struggle, the OSCE must take centre stage. It has made significant strides in Armenia and was there this week to expose the resilient shortcomings of the system. From Pristina to Moscow, there is a pressing need for engaged, active observers willing to look behind the curtain to find out what is really going on. The bells and whistles of democracy have been adapted by even the most stubborn of authoritarian regimes. The real challenge is to see what actually lies behind constitutions and the appearance of democracy to find out if real democratic standards are being fully adhered to.

In this light, it is important that the OSCE ensures the integrity of the observer system is maintained and unquestionable. It is also vital that the observers are fully trained and equipped to meet the problems of accurately observing elections in the face of potentially hostile and evasive authorities. Supports must be given to victims of human rights abuse and the freedom of the press, a cornerstone of a free society, must be fully maintained. By holding their 56 participant Governments to their word and operating on the ground to test the strength of their commitments, the OSCE keeps the spirit of the Helsinki Accords alive.

Russian troops pouring across the border into Georgian-controlled South Ossetia in 2008 was a jarring sight for many Europeans. Their last experience of full-blown conflict in the area had been the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 2000. The threat of violence remains in traditionally volatile regions such as the Caucuses and the Balkans, which have sparked off broader conflagrations. The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker gives us hope that we can emerge from the mire of conflict. He points to the decline of war as an everyday fact for the majority of people and the massive reduction in the number of deaths through conflict that previously haunted Europe. For instance, the number of deadliest wars - those that kill at least 1,000 people a year - has fallen by 78% since 1988. The OSCE has a pivotal role to play in sustaining this progress.

Its work should continue to focus on disputed areas such as Kosovo, Georgia and other deeply divided areas in the Caucuses. Simmering tensions linger and require a significant investment of time and energy by the international community. The OSCE has played an important role in managing conflict and ensuring that Europe has not slid back into the endemic "feuds of a thousand years" that Churchill lamented.

While the focus of the OSCE is on its core security function, the work takes on other facets that should be supported. The OSCE exercises a number of important roles in education, tackling corruption, combating terrorism and promoting economic growth. The roles complement the work of the OSCE in its central security work and are a pivotal part of consolidating the stability of the Continent.

It is worth reflecting on what challenges the future may bring to the OSCE. The past few decades have witnessed the pace of history accelerate. Eric Honecker said in 1989 that the Berlin Wall would last another 100 years; it lasted another ten months. Things change more quickly than we can imagine. Geopolitical shifts represent clear challenges to the OSCE security goals. The relative decline of the USA in comparison to the BRIC countries, China in particular, will shift influence away from the dominance of America over the past two decades. The changing role of NATO as the US extricates itself from an expensive defence arrangement will have a direct impact on the OSCE, for which it needs to be prepared.

The crisis engulfing the eurozone and the crisis of faith in the European project will define the EU for the next number of years. Any changes in the nature of the Union from the Schengen Agreement to mutual defence arrangements will have a direct impact on the role of the OSCE and the prospects for co-operation between European states. The future of the OSCE is inextricably bound up with the fate of the European project.

The Caucuses hold crucial supply lines for oil and gas to Europe. Their strategic importance will increase, particularly if alternative cheap sources are not developed, over the coming years. If the OSCE does not develop a coherent approach to addressing the stability and security oil and gas supply lines in these extremely volatile regions, future conflicts are inevitable.

These current and future issues form the backdrop to Ireland's chairmanship of the OSCE, which gives us a chance to play a leading role in developing a strong, coherent response to the challenges. Working in conjunction with our Lithuanian and Ukrainian counterparts as part of the OSCE troika, it is our moment to drive on the work of the OSCE. Our predecessors in the role, Lithuania, initiated a comprehensive, informal dialogue on Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian security. This dialogue included informal ambassadorial discussions based on the style and spirit of the Corfu process, which was originally introduced by the former chairmanships of Kazakhstan and Greece. These types of discussions have been the result of innovations by the past few chairmanships and now form the bedrock for dialogue between regional states. The OSCE is the only regional organization that draws together all states in the Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian areas underneath a comprehensive security concept. The range of dialogue introduced by our predecessors in the chairmanship role builds on the experience of the OSCE and its position as a platform for negotiation between states. Our chairmanship should seek to build upon that legacy and add further innovations in strengthening interstate dialogue.

I welcome the holding of a one day conference last month on the lessons to be learned from the Northern Irish peace process. Inevitably, there are limitations to using lessons from one very specific conflict in a particular context. Nevertheless, there is real potential for employing our experience in Northern Ireland across other divided regions. The technical processes of peace building, the style of meetings, the nature of the compromises reached and the long, arduous and halting journeys towards resolution are globally applicable. Through the OSCE we should continue to build upon our work to help other profoundly divided societies ravaged by violence.

One pressing matter we are in a position to raise and confront is the current perilous state of democracy and human rights in the Ukraine. The recent photographs of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko beaten up in her prison cell should disturb any democrat. The Ukraine is currently working in conjunction with Ireland as part of the chairmanship troika and will hold the chair of the OSCE next year. The systematic assault of basic democratic and human rights values under President Viktor Yanukovich mark a rolling back of progress made under the Orange revolution. Freedom House ranks the Ukraine as only partly free and has highlighted a number of human rights and political abuses. As chair of the OSCE handing over the reins to the Ukraine next year, Ireland should highlight the concerns. I am sure the Tánaiste shares them and I would like to hear his response on the matter.

Working through the OSCE, Ireland can and should use its experience in peace building. We must not shy away from the democratic impetus of the OSCE that underpins its security function. Endemic electoral difficulties in fledgling states must be tackled and, specifically, the current situation in the Ukraine must be addressed. The OSCE should continue to be at the heart of building a peaceful Europe drawing on its historic impact in the demise of the totalitarian Soviet bloc to drive on the democratisation of the region. The future challenges of maintaining peace in a changing Europe, a small continent in a globalised dynamic world, will test the OSCE. As chair, Ireland should develop a coherent response and continue to develop forums for meaningful interstate dialogue. At the core should be the goal of consolidating and building on the democratisation of Europe, the key value of our Republic, which will be the key to ensuring future peace and stability. I wish the Tánaiste well and hope he can make worthwhile progress as chair.

See this speech in context