Aideen Hayden (Labour) | Oireachtas source

This is an excellent and timely measure. While I acknowledge the Minister of State is not taking detailed comments at present, I will mention something that I have noticed a lot since the economy went into recession in 2008-09. In the 1990s, for example, Ireland had quite strong relations with other peripheral European countries and had an informal alliance with, for the sake of argument, Spain, Portugal, southern Italy to extent and other countries that suffered from some of the same broad issues of peripherality as did Ireland in the 1990s. This is a broad comment but given that Ireland still remains a small open economy that still suffers greatly from its peripheral location and given that Europe, as members discussed earlier, is expanding quite significantly more to the East, does the Minister of State envisage it might be wise for Ireland, in a much larger Europe, to build up again more bilateral contacts or to strengthen its bilateral arrangements with other countries that are more at one with Ireland in respect of the difficulties and challenges they face? I refer in particular to their geographic location and the type of social policies they pursue.