Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

I thank Deputy Quinn for his remarks. Approximately three hours was dedicated to this matter at the summit, which was far more than was allocated in the past two years. We scheduled the business on the Thursday so that most of Friday could be given over to the economic issue.

Deputy Quinn is correct. The concept of Antonio Guiteras' plan four years ago was to ensure heads of State gave time to economic matters so they were not ECB or ECOFIN business and to ensure there was drive in all countries to have a broader debate than what is sometimes the finance debate in which I, too, participated for some years.

While the Lisbon agenda is behind — there has been much criticism of what has or has not been achieved — Europe is often too hard on itself. Some six million jobs have been created during the past five years. Because of the co-ordinated effort mentioned, there is now a real emphasis in Europe in terms of research and development and putting money into the sciences. I do not believe that would have happened if everybody had paddled their own canoe. Many useful things are happening though, admittedly, we are behind on many targets. I have discussed at length with the Prime Ministers of the Netherlands and Luxembourg what it is we hoped to achieve during our three Presidencies and on what we have been focused since early last year. We are trying to benchmark the issues raised, focusing on them and identifying the deficiencies and, more important, the remedies. One of the difficulties of the past three years has been the constant debate on benchmarking without identifying what it is trying to achieve.

If there are problems with the Lisbon process it is because we tend to watch what happens internally rather than externally taking on the battles of the future, India and China and so on as Deputy Quinn knows. We tend to become focused on the internal debate such as how France, Ireland or Germany is doing rather than compiling our statistics and comparing them with countries in other continents that are extraordinarily successful.

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