Terry Leyden (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Mr. Popowski and Mr. Kiely from the Commission office in Dublin. We very much welcome the participation of the ambassadors who are representative of the various embassies at our meetings. The debate is very interesting. I am very much in favour of the enlargement of the European Union, in particular the accession of countries from the western Balkans.

I wish to concentrate specifically on Montenegro. I would like Mr. Popowski to read a report with which I was involved from 31 January 2015 called the Committee on the Honouring of Obligations and Commitments by Member States of the Council of Europe (Monitoring Committee). It relates to Resolution No. 1115 (1997). The summary of the situation is that I was monitoring Montenegro with Mr. Sasi from Finland and we carried out extensive meetings in Montenegro with the President, the Prime Minister and all Government Ministers. We prepared a report and now Montenegro is in a post-monitoring situation. We toured all of Montenegro. We went to the Roma camps, which were looking after people from the Roma community. They were doing their best in that regard. We identified the key issues in relation to the judiciary, the situation with the media, which is very important, the fight against corruption and organised crime, the right of minorities, the fight against discrimination, and the situation of refugees and internally displaced persons. We had open access to the entire Government in Montenegro, which was very important.

I wish to emphasise Montenegro but I am also in favour of all the accession candidates from the region. It is vital that we extend the European Union to promote continuing stability in the region and that we are not held back by the Brexit situation. Let us leave Brexit aside. That is being negotiated at the moment. We should not let the Government of the United Kingdom put a stop to the growth of the European Union. The European Union is bigger than any one country. We should not be delayed or delay any of those countries who are now looking forward to accession. Montenegro applied to join the EU in June 2012 and it has closed chapters 25 and 26. We carried out the report to which I referred and which was adopted unanimously by the Council of Europe on 31 January. Montenegro uses the euro although it is not in the eurozone. The euro is the main currency in Montenegro.

I found it a very peaceful region and we want to maintain that peace. There is also the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is very important that Bosnia and Herzegovina is embraced by the European Union at an early stage. I am not particularly promoting it as much as I would Montenegro and Serbia, but it will have membership in future because that is where the difficulties arose in the past. The war started in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

It just happened that I prepared this report. I am delighted now, as a member of the Seanad and a former member of the Council of Europe, to promote the report to Mr. Popowski. It has given me a great opportunity. I ask him to read the report. It is very detailed, very fair and very honest. If all of these Balkan states are not given encouragement, they could revert back to the same situation as we had before. They are very hungry to join. They promoted to me the fact they were very concerned about joining NATO. I made the point to them that it was not necessary to join NATO to join the European Union. We are not members of NATO and it is likely we will not be members of NATO, but there is this idea in the region. They are worried about Russia, of course, and I accept this, and they want to maintain security. Relationships in the region between Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia and Kosovo are good and we want to maintain this.

I am delighted to have had this opportunity as a member of the committee, which is a very important committee in this regard. At some stage I would like to meet a delegation from Montenegro, or any other applicant state, at one of our future meetings to discuss its application to the European Union. I support fully Montenegro and I ask Mr. Popowski to push it. By the way, many of Mr. Popowski's neighbours from Poland are in Ireland and are working very well. Ireland also has an awfully big investment in Poland. It works both ways. Many Irish people work in Poland. The Polish people here are more than welcome and they play a very important role. Only for them we would not have as many clergymen here as we do.