Introduction

Ireland is recognised as a longstanding champion of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda. Mainstreaming the WPS Agenda was a golden thread running through all of our work on the United Nations Security Council, during our most recent term as an elected member in 2021 and 2022. In this article, I will reflect on some of our achievements on the Council, as well as the challenges we faced, with regard to our work on WPS and women’s participation in decision-making.

As recent events in the Middle East, Ukraine, Afghanistan and Ethiopia have reiterated, the rights of women and girls are a peace and security issue. Now, more than ever, we need to promote the Women, Peace and Security Agenda: the proliferation of armed conflicts around the world serves as a stark reminder of its importance and the role the UN and the international community must play to ensure women’s full, equal and meaningful participation at all decision-making levels.

Ireland’s commitment to gender equality and women’s participation shaped our work right across the Security Council agenda, where we consistently sought to translate high-level commitments into practical reality. As a result, we sought to promote greater collective efforts to mainstream WPS throughout the work of the Security Council.

We continue to urge current and incoming Security Council members to maintain the momentum on implementing the Women, Peace and Security Agenda. We must redouble our efforts to prevent rollbacks and build upon the gains made since the adoption of the original UN Security Council resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. This is not only an end in itself, but will also help us to achieve a more peaceful and equal world.

As we heard from Mary Robinson, Ireland’s first woman President and current Chair of The Elders, speaking during Ireland’s Presidency of the Security Council in September 2021, “Women’s rights are not western rights. They are fundamental human rights”.

Ireland’s Election to the Security Council

The year 2022 marked one hundred years since the establishment of the Irish Free State. One of the first acts of the Irish Free State was to seek membership of the League of Nations (often considered the predecessor of the United Nations). The principles we articulated over one hundred years ago on joining the League of Nations and continue to inform Ireland’s approach to our foreign policy today—the belief that all countries, large and small, have an equal right to live in peace and to contribute to international peace and security, and the belief that all people have the right to live in dignity, and to have their human rights and fundamental freedoms respected.

Our term on the UN Security Council coincided with this centenary of Ireland’s independence, allowing us to reflect on our principles and ideals as a nation. This inclination—to look outwards, to work with others, to be part of agreed global systems and structures that shape and regulate how we act as nation states—remains at the core of Ireland’s foreign policy today.

In seeking election to the Security Council, we believed that Ireland, as a small, independent country with a deep and longstanding commitment to the UN, could make a difference. Above all, we wanted to help the Security Council fulfil its critically important mandate, as laid out in the UN Charter: the maintenance of international peace and security.

Our 2021–2022 term on the UN Security Council was underpinned by three core principles that guided our work and engagement:

  1. 1.

    Building peace, including strengthening UN peacekeeping and peacebuilding globally;

  2. 2.

    Strengthening conflict prevention, by addressing factors that drive conflict;

  3. 3.

    Ensuring accountability, through working to end impunity for those responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian and human rights law.

These principles came not only from our own foreign policy priorities, but also from the UN Charter itself which gives the Security Council its mandate on the maintenance of international peace and security.

The Importance of Partnerships

Partnership is always essential in diplomacy and none of our work on the Security Council would have been possible without the partnerships we built, maintained and nourished—with other governments, with the UN system, with civil society partners, with analysts, journalists and academic partners, with the Oireachtas (Irish parliament) and with the Irish public.

Partnership becomes all the more essential at times when geopolitical tensions are high. In this environment, Ireland’s role as an elected member of the Council—as a country that is clear in its principles, committed to the UN Charter and to multilateralism, and convinced by the value of cross-regional partnerships—became even more important.

Ireland’s experience was that a constructive relationship with all Security Council members was critical to achieving progress on key files at the Council. Throughout our term, we sought to be a constructive and thoughtful member, focused on solutions and working openly with all partners.

Our investment in partnership and dialogue went beyond the Council chamber in New York—our then Foreign Minister Simon Coveney travelled to meet with counterparts from all parts of the world, including a visit to China in May 2021 to meet with Foreign Minister Wang Yi, to discuss key issues of importance for Ireland and China on the UN Security Council agenda, and areas for collaboration.

As I will outline in further detail below, working closely with Mexico and Kenya on the Women, Peace and Security Agenda was a further illustration of how our partnerships have been key to making progress on issues that matter at the Council.

Ireland’s Work on Women, Peace and Security at the UN Security Council

Ireland has built a strong international reputation as a leader in the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda, and it remains a central priority of our foreign policy. We worked hard to ensure that the WPS Agenda was at the heart of the Security Council’s work, and we delivered key results in this area.

Ireland has broad and longstanding experience in WPS—we are currently implementing our third National Action Plan (NAP) on Women, Peace and Security (2019–24). This has received special recognition by the UN Secretary-General for including in its design women from conflict-affected areas living in Ireland, and rural and minority women.

Ireland is also a board member of the WPS-Humanitarian Action (WPS-HA) Compact that emerged from the Generation Equality Forum (GEF), a multi-stakeholder, inter-generational global initiative to accelerate the implementation of the WPS Agenda and further strengthen gender equality and women’s rights, convened by UN Women and launched in June 2021.

In addition, Ireland is a WPS champion within the Action for Peacekeeping (A4P) initiative and supports the UN Secretary-General’s efforts to ensure women’s full, equal and meaningful participation in peacekeeping.

The WPS “Presidency Trio” and the “Shared Commitments”

Throughout our term on the Security Council, we worked to move the WPS Agenda forward in a number of clear and practical ways.

In partnership with Mexico, we championed the full, equal and meaningful participation of women, through chairing the Informal Expert Group on Women, Peace and Security, a Working Group of the Council. This working group facilitates a more systematic approach to WPS within the Council’s work and enables greater oversight and coordination of implementation efforts.

In September 2021, at our initiative, Ireland together with Mexico and Kenya formed a “Women, Peace and Security Presidency Trio”, committing to using our respective Security Council Presidencies to integrate WPS fully into the Council’s work, across all thematic and country files. This involved developing a set of “Shared Commitments”, which outlined tangible actions to advance the implementation of the WPS Agenda.

Over the three months of the “Presidency Trio” (September to November 2021), we oversaw a number of key achievements. We achieved significant improvement in the gender balance amongst briefers to the Council, ensuring that half (49%) were women, who spoke to a range of areas relating to peace and security. We also encouraged UN briefers to include substantive gender analysis in their briefings to help ensure that Council members heard detailed reporting and analysis on the situation on the ground for women and girls. We strengthened WPS language in Council products such as mandates, resolutions and Presidential Statements. We pushed for geographic debates to include a WPS focus. Ireland also led two WPS-focused press briefings (known as “stakeouts”) during our tenure—since then, it has become commonplace for Member States who have signed up to the Shared Commitments “group”, numbering 17 current and former UNSC members (as of December 2023), to undertake joint press stakeouts.

Wherever possible, we tried to build on the momentum by highlighting the importance of WPS in discussions with other member states. A summary report outlining the achievements of the WPS Presidency Trio initiative was circulated to the UN Security Council (S/2022/91) encouraging future presidencies to continue finding tangible ways to implement the WPS Agenda.

It is clear that the WPS commitments launched by the Presidency Trio proved to be a very effective way of progressing change at the Council. We were deeply heartened by the fact that so many other member states have since built upon this initiative and adopted the “WPS Shared Commitments” during their subsequent presidencies. As a result, we have seen a sustained commitment to bringing greater gender parity to the Council, and more collective action to draw public attention to the need to accelerate the full implementation of the WPS Agenda.

Peacekeeping and WPS

In 1958, just three years after Ireland joined the United Nations, while we were still a very poor nation, our service as international peacekeepers began. I know China also shares this commitment to peacekeeping, being the largest troop contributor amongst the permanent members of the Security Council, and the second-largest contributor to the UN peacekeeping budget.

In fact, Ireland today has the longest unbroken peacekeeping record of any nation in the world. We take great pride in this commitment, although we must never forget the dangers that come with this work, or how the members of the Irish Defence Forces serving on peacekeeping missions risk their lives every day in order to build and maintain peace in conflict zones across the world. We pay particular tribute to those Irish Defence Forces personnel who have died serving in UN peacekeeping missions, including most recently Private Seán Rooney who was tragically killed in Lebanon in December 2022 when serving with UNIFIL.

Reflecting this longstanding commitment to peacekeeping, our work on the Security Council included efforts to ensure that peacekeeping mandates were clear, credible, realistic and adequately resourced. A particular highlight was Ireland’s leadership to secure the adoption of Security Council Resolution 2594 on Peacekeeping Transitions, which aims to help to the UN better prepare and manage transitions, after peacekeepers leave. We worked hard to ensure this resolution contained strong WPS and human rights language, including requesting the UN Secretary-General ensure the mainstreaming of a gender perspective, and that gender analysis and technical gender expertise are included throughout all stages of the transition process. We hope this resolution will be one of the lasting legacies of our time on the Council.

More broadly, we also sought to ensure that the Security Council’s Resolutions on Women, Peace and Security were implemented effectively across the UN’s peacekeeping and political missions. Our role as co-chair of the Informal Expert Group on Women Peace and Security also allowed for close engagement with the senior leadership of UN missions in monitoring actions to implement the WPS Agenda on the ground.

Peacebuilding and WPS

As well as recognising the vital importance of peacekeeping, we also understand the importance of investing in peacebuilding. In particular, as we know from our own experience of conflict on the island of Ireland, the participation of women is essential to building sustainable peace. Women can make an indispensable contribution to peace-making when they have a seat at the table. Yet, all too often, they are prevented from participating and from being part of decision-making. Ireland has therefore been a consistent advocate for ensuring women are included at all stages of peace negotiations.

Over the period of our Security Council tenure, Ireland pushed for the full, equal and meaningful inclusion of women in UN-led peace processes. As we saw from an Arria-formula meeting on ensuring women’s participation in UN-led peace processes that we convened with Mexico at the Security Council in March 2021, there was a strong call across Member States for the UN to take a lead on this—indeed, that women’s participation should be a requirement for UN-led peace processes.

The Arria-formula meeting followed a commitment in 2020 by the UN Secretary-General to ensure women are better represented in peace processes. However, we remain concerned that despite commitments, not enough progress has been made in this area. According to the UN Secretary-General’s report on WPS in September 2022, although women participated in all peace processes led and co-led by the UN in 2021, representation of women in peace processes has in fact been decreasing (from 23% in 2020 to 19% in 2021). Urgent political leadership is still required to turn this trend, and we are encouraged that it was the focus of the Secretary-General’s WPS report to the Council in 2023.

Engaging with Civil Society on WPS

Amplifying the voices of women in conflict and post-conflict settings remains key to promoting and safeguarding gender equality. In this regard, Ireland worked hard to ensure that women’s voices were heard at the Security Council, and we maintained an ongoing dialogue with grassroots women peacebuilders throughout our tenure.

During the WPS Trio Presidency (September to November 2021), 35 women civil society briefers participated in Council meetings, representing almost half (49%) of all civil society briefers in 2021. This is significant given that as recently as the 1990s, there were no women from civil society briefing the Council in any meeting. In September 2021, during Ireland’s Security Council Presidency month, we brought the voices of 16 women civil society briefers to the Council table—a record number for any Security Council Presidency.

In the case of Afghanistan, since the Taliban takeover of Kabul, we have seen an alarming and unacceptable regression in respect for human rights. This has had a particularly devastating impact for women and girls, including their right to education, employment, movement and other activities in public spaces. In this context, Ireland used its seat on the Security Council to stand by Afghan women and to push for accountability for the actions of the Taliban.

During our Security Council tenure, we met regularly with Afghan human rights activists and women leaders. Our leadership on Afghanistan at the Council was directly informed by the courageous activism of these and many other Afghan women. Their advice and concerns informed Ireland’s engagement—from pushing for strong language on gender and human rights in the Council’s statements and resolutions on Afghanistan to galvanising support for Afghan women and girls amongst other member states. In particular, we helped to ensure that the mandate for the UN Mission in Afghanistan included strong provisions on women’s rights.

Standing alone, we refused to agree to an extension of the exemption to the UN travel ban that senior members of the Taliban enjoyed—we believed that the Taliban, like others responsible for abuses or violations of human rights, must face accountability for their actions.

Conclusion

There is no doubt in my mind that Ireland had a sustained, positive impact during our time on the Council—we lived up to our pledge to be an inclusive, ambitious and responsive Security Council member.

Thanks to Ireland’s leadership on Women, Peace and Security at the Security Council, during our tenure, we saw greater collective efforts to ensure the WPS Agenda was better reflected throughout the work of the Council. We are very proud of these achievements.

Since the end of our term, Ireland has continued to build on the legacy of our work on the Council. We remain guided by our three principles—building peace, preventing conflict and ensuring accountability. We have maintained our engagement on many of the priorities we worked to advance during our tenure, including on WPS and in particular on ensuring the full, equal and meaningful participation of women in all aspects of peace and security.

At the UN General Assembly, we continue to work towards the implementation of the UN initiative “Our Common Agenda”, as well as the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We are running for a seat on the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva for the 2027–2029 term. We will continue to play an active role in regional bodies such as the OSCE and the Council of Europe, where we held the Presidency in 2022. And of course the European Union will remain at the centre of our foreign policy, and indeed who we are as a country, as we celebrated fifty years of EU membership in 2023 and look towards our next EU Presidency in the second half of 2026.

The partnerships we developed while on the Security Council continue to be crucial, particularly with Small Island Developing States, and countries in Africa, as well as our strong ongoing engagement with civil society.

Despite its flaws, the Security Council continues to play a pivotal role at the heart of the multilateral system. When the Council can find a common cause and take action, it can deliver outcomes that can have an immense impact on the ground. We cannot address global challenges—like conflict, climate change and food insecurity—without it. We have seen first-hand that, with political will and with partnership, multilateralism can deliver results.

Turning again to the words of Mary Robinson, speaking during Ireland’s Presidency of the Security Council in September 2021, “A united and purposeful Security Council is needed now more than ever”.