Brian Lenihan Jnr (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)

That is extraordinary. I must say I have a great attachment to our ancestral language and speak it. It is very appropriate on some occasions but as far as Europe is concerned, it is a fact that the members of the European family are increasingly using English as their common language. I realise that the French tradition does not welcome that particular development but the reality is that the central and eastern European states that have joined the EU, which spoke French in the inter-war period and Russian after 1945, see English as the international language of the future.

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