Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the ambassador for coming before the committee and addressing us on the priorities for the Greek Presidency. We congratulate Greece on the Presidency and its contribution in the past and wish it well in respect of this Presidency, which is a very important one from Greek and European perspectives. As we all know, Greece has contributed greatly to society in the millennia gone by and there is no reason why its contribution in the present time cannot be as great. There are a number of challenges that the ambassador recognises and has outlined. Economic and social challenges have emerged over the past number of years that need to be dealt with. In our Presidency, we did our utmost to deal with them, as have prior and subsequent Presidencies.

This is a unique time, as we all know. It is not like anything we have had in the past. There were new experiences and new very unpopular measures had to be taken by governments throughout the EU both within the eurozone and outside it. In these times, there is a great opportunity for a Presidency to take ownership of the Presidency and the European project and progress it because the challenges we have experienced in the past number of years should and could have been anticipated but were not. There are lessons to be learned from that. There are also lessons that continue to be learned from the perspective of people who tend to exclude themselves from identification with European unionism, for want of a better description. We see the emergence of euroscepticism, to which the ambassador referred, and its popularity. It is a good time to remind all those who are eurosceptics of what happened when Euroscepticism or a similar approach emerged in the past and its consequences. There is no harm in reflecting on those issues at this particular time.

It is also no harm to remember that easy options will always be presented by people who usually do not have responsibility but hope to have it at some time in the future. It is a great opportunity for a Presidency to be able to explain to its own people and the European community at large that, unfortunately, easy options have not worked in the past. If they had worked, we would all be practising them.

There is also an opportunity to once again pinpoint the successes of the past and the past 60 years in particular - the things that went right - and how much the people of Europe have benefitted from those decisions made at that time and which will live on. One of the things we learned during our Presidency and over the past four or five years is that things happened that were not anticipated but should have been anticipated not only by our own institutions but by European institutions. There are lessons to be learned from that which we hope will result in measures being taken which do not negatively impact in particular on one member state or two or three member states but which should be accepted as being part and parcel of the responsibility of the evolving European project. As long as that happens, the EU is safe and secure and will progress and achieve the economic progress to which we aspire. If there is one thing that must be learned from the experiences we have been through, it is that we can prevail. All those prophets of doom and gloom that predicated annihilation, oblivion and the end of all that we knew were wrong. All those who predicted the things that allegedly could be done in the good times were wrong as well. So we go back to basics and basic economic thinking and basic social policy and will recover and rebuild anew.

I apologise as I must go to another committee that is in session at the same time in which I must play a particular part.