Restriction on Iraq arms report queried

The Minister for Foreign Affairs has rejected Opposition claims that the UN Security Council has been enormously damaged by restricting the report of Iraq's declaration on nuclear weapons to the five permanent members.

Mr Cowen said: "The decision has our approval". He told the Dáil that Ireland and the other council members expected to see a revised report - some 3,000 pages, with sensitive material removed - in the next 24 to 48 hours, and a preliminary assessment next week.

Labour's foreign affairs spokesman, Mr Michael D. Higgins, said the restriction meant that a non-proliferation country like Ireland was regarded as a "dangerous source" even though elected to the Security Council by a large number of UN members.

Fine Gael's spokesman, Mr Gay Mitchell, said the decision was "a further genuflection in the direction of the superiority, so to speak, of the five permanent members", and asked why Ireland chose not to seek to examine the documents.

Mr John Gormley, the Green Party spokesman, said it was nonsense to suggest that the sensitive material could fall into the wrong hands and be used by rogue states. The real reason, according to a UN official, was "trepidation among the major powers about revealing the names of Baghdad's former weapons suppliers."

Mr John Bruton (FG, Meath) said Britain and the US were indicating a prejudice not to accept the report's adequacy, just a day after receiving it and "when it is possible they may not have been able to read it properly".

The Minister agreed that "there should not be a premature assessment of what is clearly a voluminous amount of documentation". There were elements in the administrations which had a certain view regardless of what efforts were made by the UN, but that would not deflect the Government from its position to await the considered assessment by the inspection teams of these matters.

Mr Cowen said that the nature and extent of Iraq's nuclear capacity would be brought to their attention. He added: "We do not have the capacity and expertise ourselves. We are non-proliferators and we do not believe that type of information should be widely available."

It was decided by the full Security Council that the weapons report would only be seen by the weapons inspections teams and the five members "who possess the necessary expertise".

Mr Higgins asked how it could be seen as "assisting the process" if Britain and the US had access to documents and Ireland's representative did not.

The report was not circulated as a full report because it contained sensitive material, the Minister insisted. "We would be able to handle that material, but it is a question of allowing those who have been given a task to do it."