Mrs. Eli Bojadjieska Ristovski:

I thank the Senator for her kind words of support. They are really appreciated. My presence here today is to, as I stated in my opening remarks, express how appreciative we are of the Irish support and how much we value it. As the Senator said, Ireland has been one of the most vocal, if not the most vocal, supporters of the EU enlargement.

Currently we have, as of last Friday, opened the screening process.

EU experts are now analysing every law and how much the country is ready for the start of the accession negotiations. This process will take 13 months. During those 13 months of analytical examination or screening of the body of the EU acquis, we will get to familiarise ourselves with the EU laws and standards that we will need to apply or implement in our legislation. We have been a candidate country for 17 long years owing to various reasons, the first of which was Greece and the issue of our name, and then Bulgaria and the question of identity and language. In those 17 years, we have not just waited in the lobby without doing anything. We have been preparing ourselves. If members read the European Commission's reports, they will see that the country has made tremendous reforms over the past several years to align its legislation with the EU acquis. We have worked in the background even though we have not started the negotiations.

While the decision is not mine, we have been receiving positive assessments from the European Commission so far. We are as ready as Serbia and Montenegro, which have already been negotiating with the EU for a few years. The screening process consists of two phases. The first is the explanatory session, which is very technical EU wording that I do not grasp very well. The second is the bilateral session, in which each country is invited to present where it stands chapter by chapter. At the end of this, the Commission will evaluate our readiness and present an assessment of the country's degree of preparedness. It will then start opening cluster by cluster. Our goal is to move quickly through those chapters and clusters and implement the reforms as well as the strong commitment that our Government has made.

The timeline is difficult to predict, but we would like to join the package with Serbia and Montenegro and join the EU by 2030, if possible. That is a deadline that we would like to achieve.