We welcome President Kagame to the Council today. Rwanda has suffered the pain of civil war and genocide. In Ireland, we understand the consequences of intercommunal violence and the difficulties of building trust and understanding between communities which have been engaged in deep and sustained vi…
Ireland welcomes today’s debate on peace-building. Remarkably, it is only in very recent years that the Security Council has formally addressed this subject, and today’s meeting offers a welcome opportunity to further develop our thinking together. The Swedish Presidency of the European Union will s…
May I extend warmest congratulations to you, Sir, on Tunisia’s assumption of the presidency of the Council.
In welcoming President Joseph Kabila to the Council today, may I also extend our condolences to him and to his family on the death of the late President Laurent Kabila.
We commend the initia…
I thank you, Mr. President, for convening this important meeting. I also thank Ambassador Chowdhury, Chairman of the Security Council Committee concerning Sierra Leone, for his work and for the statement he made earlier. I am grateful also for the presence of the members of the Panel of Experts on S…
I would like to thank the Representative of the Secretary-General, Cheikh Tidiane Sy, for briefing us today on developments in the Central African Republic. I am also grateful to Mr. Lyons of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and to Mr. Karlsson of the World Bank. Those organizations a…
I would like to thank you, Mr. President, for calling this open meeting today. Ireland associates itself fully with everything in the statement which will be delivered by Ambassador Schori of Sweden, as representative of the presidency of the European Union. I would like to take the opportunity of t…
I am taking the floor to make some corrections with regard to the draft resolution recommended for adoption by the General Assembly in paragraph 7 of document A/55/579/Add.3, submitted under sub-item (c) of agenda item 92, entitled “Macroeconomic policy questions: External debt crisis and developmen…
Allow me to begin by thanking the President of the General Assembly at its fifty-fourth session, and Minister for Foreign Affairs of Namibia, His Excellency Mr. Theo-Ben Gurirab, as well as the two Vice-Chairmen of the Open-ended Working Group on the Question of Equitable Representation on and Incre…
I welcome this comprehensive and stimulating report from the Secretary-General on the work of our Organization (A/55/1). In his introduction he notes that the turn of the millennium provides a unique vantage point from which to view humanity’s progress and challenges. In fact, the Secretary-General …
Your election, Sir, as President of the Millennium Assembly is fitting recognition of your great dedication to international peace. Ireland is especially grateful for your outstanding contribution to the Good Friday agreement signed in Belfast in 1998. We are sure that the qualities that you display…
Throughout the 45 years of our United Nations membership, Ireland has been an unwavering supporter of this Organization. We have consistently valued its achievements, even if we have sometimes been frustrated by its shortcomings or grieved by its failures. We have striven to take the opportunities a…
Before continuing, may I welcome most warmly the introductory remarks you, Sir, have just made following your contacts in the lead-up to today’s debate and to our future work in the Open-ended Working Group. I agree with your wise comments and conclusions in their entirety. They reflect a measured b…
I wish to thank Ambassador Sergey Lavrov for his presentation of the report of the Security Council in his capacity as President of the Security Council. I also wish to join those who have congratulated the Security Council secretariat on the hard work that went into the production of the report.
T…
I wish to begin by congratulating the Secretary-General for presenting us once again with a stimulating and comprehensive report on the work of the Organization. It offers a broad survey of the main achievements of the United Nations, but more importantly, as the Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs s…
Mr. President, I congratulate you, the Foreign Minister of Namibia, on your election as President of the General Assembly at its fifty-fourth session. Your experience as the Namibian people's chief representative in New York during your country's struggle for independence and your role in guiding Na…
The report of the Open-ended Working Group which we are considering in this debate is one of the more detailed and substantive to have been produced. This is as it should be after five years of intensive work, and it shows that all the key issues of
However, before turning to these, I want to pay a…
We welcome the opportunity which this debate gives us to look back at some of the principal issues that were addressed over the past year and to measure how successfully we, the Member States, as well as the Organization as a whole, have tackled them.
In the first place, I want to extend our gratit…
I will be short. The draft resolution that the General Assembly is about to adopt marks an important step in our collective work to reform the United Nations.
In September, Heads of Delegation, in welcoming the Secretary-General's proposals for reform, underlined the political importance of making …
I have been told that I should make this statement from the rostrum, and since I'm a docile person and also since I'm sitting very close to the rostrum —
The position of Ireland, and a number of other small and medium-sized countries, on the principal issues of substance concerning the enlargement and working methods of the Security Council was circulated to the Open-ended Working Group earlier this year — almost exactly two years after they were fir…
