Widely Praised Minister For External Affairs
Aiken was Minister for Finance for three years following the war and was involved in economic post–war development, in the industrial, agricultural, educational and other spheres. However, it was his two periods as Minister for External Affairs that Aiken fulfilled his enormous political potential. As Foreign Minister he adopted where possible an independent stance for Ireland at the United Nations and other international forums such as the Council of Europe. Despite a great deal of opposition, both at home and abroad, he stubbornly asserted the right of smaller UN member countries to discuss the representation of communist China at the General Assembly. Unable to bring the issue of the partition of Ireland to the UN (because of Britain's veto on the Security Council) and because of unwillingness of other Western nations to interfere in what these Western nations saw as British affairs at that time (the US taking a more ambiguous position), Aiken ensured that Ireland vigorously defended the rights of small nations such as Tibet and Hungary, nations whose problems he felt Ireland could identify with and had a moral obligation to help.
Aiken also supported the right of countries such as Algeria to self-determination and spoke out against apartheid in South Africa. Under Ireland’s policy of promoting the primacy of international law and reducing global tension at the height of the Cold War, Aiken promoted the idea of areas of law, which he believed would free the most tense regions around the world from the threat of nuclear war.
He also introduced the so-called 'Aiken Plan' to the United Nations in an effort to combine disarmament and peace in the Middle East, Ireland a country being on good terms with both Israel and many Arab countries. In the UN the Irish delegation sat between Iraq and Israel and formed a kind of physical 'buffer' and in the days of Aiken (who as a minister spent a lot of time with the UN delegation) both the Italians (who on their turn sat in the vicinity of the Iraqi delegation), the Irish and the Israeli claimed to be the one and only UN-delegation of New York, a city inhabited by many Irish, Jewish and Italians.
Aiken was also a champion of nuclear non-proliferation and he received the honour of being the first minister to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968 in Moscow.
Aiken's impact as Minister for External Affairs was such that he is sometimes seen as the father of Irish foreign policy. His performance was praised in particular by a later Minister for Foreign Affairs, Fine Gael's Garret FitzGerald.
Read more about this topic: Frank Aiken
Famous quotes containing the words widely, praised, minister, external and/or affairs:
“To have no son, no wife,
No house or land still seemed quite natural.
Only a numbness registered the shock
Of finding out how much had gone of life,
How widely from the others.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“No man deserves to be praised for his goodness, who has it not in his power to be wicked. Goodness without that power is generally nothing more than sloth, or an impotence of will.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“He had a gentleman-like frankness in his behaviour, and as a great point of honour as a minister can have, especially a minister at the head of the treasury, where numberless sturdy and insatiable beggars of condition apply, who cannot all be gratified, nor all with safety be refused.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“The boundary line between self and external world bears no relation to reality; the distinction between ego and world is made by spitting out part of the inside, and swallowing in part of the outside.”
—Norman O. Brown (b. 1913)
“Blunders are an inescapable feature of war, because choice in military affairs lies generally between the bad and the worse.”
—Allan Massie (b. 1938)