The international treaty banning cluster munitions has been formally adopted by 111 countries at Croke Park.
Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin addressed a closing ceremony to the two-week Dublin conference at midday today.
The treaty (read in pdf) was agreed on Wednesday night. It will be signed by the countries involved in Oslo in December.
Mr Martin was to hand a copy of the treaty to the Deputy Foreign Minister of Norway, who will take it to Oslo. States have to ratify the text after it is signed on 2-3 December.
The treaty outlaws the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of cluster munitions. It also provides for victim welfare and clearing contaminated areas.
Politicians and campaigners insisted it was a hugely significant pact despite the absence of key powers like the US, China and Russia.
Read more about the fight to ban cluster bombs.
Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere insisted the treaty would stigmatise the use of cluster bombs among those countries keeping their stockpiles.
'We have an ambitious result. I believe this has a norm-setting function. If the purpose is to win hearts and minds, do you win hearts and minds by not distinguishing between a military target and civilians?'
Major powers 'bound to notice'
Mr Stoere said the text would have been better had the world's major producers and users of cluster bombs attended.
'It would have been better if they were all here but the approach we have chosen is the realistic approach and it was not realistic to have them here,' he said.
'Would the world be better off if we dropped the whole thing because they are not here? The answer is no. They are bound to notice what we are saying,' he said.
Cluster munitions are among the weapons posing the gravest dangers to civilians, especially in heavily bombed countries like Laos, Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Dropped from planes or fired from artillery, they explode in mid-air, randomly scattering bomblets, with many civilians having been killed or maimed by their indiscriminate, wide area effect.
They also pose a lasting threat as many bomblets fail to explode on impact.
Norwegian Deputy Defence Minister Espen Barth Eide said that countries wanted their military actions to be seen as legitimate, and compared the potential impact of the Dublin text to the 1997 Ottawa Treaty on landmines.
'With the landmine treaty, the US did not sign it but we don't really care because they behave as if they have signed it because they recognise they are morally outlawed,' he said.
The cluster munitions treaty requires the destruction of stockpiled munitions within eight years - though it leaves the door open for future, more precise generations of cluster bombs that pose less harm to civilians.
The treaty was welcomed by the Cluster Munition Coalition (CMC), an umbrella group of non-governmental organisations, which hopes it will stigmatise cluster munitions.
'It's going to be politically impossible now for any country to use this weapon, we believe, without suffering the sort of backlash that is going to be too high a political price to pay,' CMC coordinator Thomas Nash said.
Soraj Ghulam Habib, whose legs were blown off seven years ago by a cluster bomb in Afghanistan, said he now felt his suffering was not in vain.
'Victims need a lot of support and now work can be done to make victims self-reliant, not let them be like beggars on the street,' the 17-year-old said.
'I want to save their lives and I hope that cluster munitions will never again be used by any states.'
