“IRELAND AND SLOVAKIA, PARTNERS IN AN ENLARGED EUROPE” AT COMENIUS UNIVERSITY
“IRELAND AND SLOVAKIA, PARTNERS IN AN ENLARGED EUROPE” AT COMENIUS UNIVERSITY, BRATISLAVA
I am very honoured indeed to receive the Great Gold Medal of Comenius University not just because I join a list of eminent recipients from around the globe and from a wide field of human endeavour, but because as a former professional educator, it links me to the name of the man who has been called the Father of Modern Education and to this renowned University which proudly follows his philosophy. Comenius championed the equal education of rich and poor, of male and female. He knew that our world would never ever realize its fullest potential until education unlocked the genius of each and every human being. Four hundred years and more after his birth we still wait for a world in which his vision flourishes widely but here, you keep that vision alive and give us hope that its realization is possible.
I have arrived as the first Irish Head of State to visit Slovakia, at a time of great hope as your country takes the historic step of joining the family of nations that is the European Union. We in Ireland have admired the enormous efforts that you have undertaken to prepare for this transforming moment and I know that the Irish people look forward to working with the people of Slovakia across a range of interests and concerns as we travel the journey into the future together. As we draw closer in partnership, we are fulfilling the noble dream of the Union’s founders when, appalled by the ruin of the twentieth century they insisted we could create a peaceful and prosperous Europe through respectful, formal collaboration between her sovereign states.
Each nation brings its own story, its own unique perspective to the Union table. Ireland brings the perspective of a small island on the Western periphery of Europe but one which has strong historic links to Europe as well as to its enormous global family scattered across every continent but particularly in the United States, Canada and Australia.
You bring the perspective of a country right at the continent’s center, which shares a land border with neighbours, who are neither members of the Union nor candidates for admission. You are particularly well placed to ensure that no new dividing lines are allowed to develop in Europe. You have a rich collection of national minorities living within the border of your beautiful country and so have much to teach us about respect for diversity and the need to pursue enlightened policies of equality and integration.
For all the differences in our histories, there are certain experiences which we share and which create the kind of spontaneous empathies on which friendship grows easily. We have both come out of long histories of difficult relations with bigger, dominating neighbours and we both have had quite a struggle to establish our own place in the world. We each treasure our cultural identity and we want that identity to flourish as never before.
What is our shared future likely to offer us? Maybe I should begin to answer that by reflecting on how the Irish people view this exciting phase of enlargement and our thirty year membership of the Union.
Enlargement
We in Ireland consider that the potential accession by ten new Member States from Central and Eastern Europe, Cyprus and Malta, constitutes one of the most positive developments since the foundation of the then EEC in 1957. It puts the dark days of the last century firmly behind us and confirms the underlying dynamism and destiny of the European Union. We are particularly fortunate that our capital city Dublin will be center stage on Accession Day - May 1st next year as Ireland will hold the Union Presidency at that time. It is there that old friends will be welcomed as new colleagues.
We know how good membership has been for Ireland and we believe that others are entitled to the same opportunities that were given to us. We also know the worries and concerns our people had at the time we joined and so as you get ready to begin your new future in the Union it might be helpful if I told a little of Ireland’s voyage from the status of candidate country to that of a confident player on the European scene.
Experience of membership
Before we joined, Ireland was relatively poor and underdeveloped, dependent to a high degree on agriculture. We had high emigration, high unemployment and a small export market. There were worries about our ability to cope with open markets, about our vulnerability as a small nation among larger nations. There was concern at the potential threat to our hard won independence and our jealously guarded identity.
Today we see those worries in a new light. We have a successful economy, low unemployment, a highly globalised and sophisticated export market. We punch above our weight in Europe and our cultural identity has never been stronger. We are comfortably Irish, comfortably European. We started with 60 per cent of the European average income and today we are at 130 per cent. We started with low added value agricultural exports. Today we are the world’s largest exporter of computer software.
No magic formula transformed us overnight. In fact our transformation took two decades, a lot of pain and a lot of hard work.
Membership and its significant financial transfers became a stimulus for economic growth and for social development. We greatly improved our road and telecommunications infrastructure, broadened access to education which gave us an educated workforce attractive to investors. We promoted a culture of equality which brought thousands more women into the workforce releasing fresh seams of energy into our human capacity grid. We developed a successful social partnership model which created the stable economic climate so attractive to inward investment. We cultivated a dynamic new native entrepreneurial sector which is now the ninth most important source of foreign investment in the United States and significant investors in Europe. We created a benign corporate tax regime for foreign investors and generally prompted ourselves to move into a new self-confident gear and to leave behind the uninspiring fatalism of the past. If the Structural and Cohesion Funds gave us a hand up, the Single Market opened up our ambitions and our genius and it is that market which has made the biggest contribution to the growth of our economy.
Today one of the most remarkable showcases of our changed times is to be seen in the complete recasting of our relationship with Britain. Historically fraught, violent and resentful it has become collegial and friendly through our interactions in Brussels and today a new spirit of consensus between the two governments has empowered the developing Peace Process in Northern Ireland.
The Future of Europe debate
We have had our problems and we face plenty of challenges not least of which is to sustain and consolidate our achievements well into the future whatever the ambient global or internal pressures. But as a Member of the Union there are both formal and informal opportunities to learn from others and to find solutions which are sourced from a broader base of experience than simply our own. Every country naturally sees its own success as a priority but because membership imposes on us a responsibility for our common European citizenship, we each have to commit to the urgent task of charting a coherent course for the future of the Union and bringing the citizens on board as active, convinced, connected participants. The big debate on the Future of Europe has gathered quite a momentum already and is moving into a new and decisive phase in the coming weeks in the European Convention and at the European Council in Thessalonika.
The starting point of this debate is, thankfully a reassuring one. The European Union has been an enormous success with a catalogue of considerable achievements already to its name. The very diversity of views expressed and the sheer openness of the debate in the Convention indicates a mass of positive energy at the heart of the Union and bodes well for its future. I am particularly delighted that there has been very close co-operation between the Irish and the Slovak representatives at the Convention and I trust that will set the scene for our future relationships. I also hope that as the ideas distil, the fullest possible consensus can be reached, making the task of the Intergovernmental Conference that much easier and the future much clearer.
Conclusion
One thing is absolutely clear though and that is that history will be made in Dublin on May 1st: history for Slovakia, for Ireland, for the European Union. If excitement is mounting in Bratislava I can assure you the same is true of my own capital city. We know such days come only rarely in a lifetime and we are determined to respond to the profound sense of history in the making and to be, as we have always been, an efficient, effective and impartial Council President, mindful of all views, welcoming of all our partner nations. To us may fall the task of the final negotiation of a new Treaty on the Future of Europe and our small island sees in these events the very strength of European membership. Without that membership we are simply a small, easily ignored nation. With membership, we have a powerful platform on which to exhibit and develop our talents and our dreams. Slovakia will soon feel that same surge of power. I wish you a great success story and look forward to the contribution your country and mine will make to Europe’s tomorrow. No generation has ever known an Ireland as good as today’s Ireland except I hope the generation which will share common Union citizenship with Slovakia.
I wish to once again thank you for your warm welcome and attention.