Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

We should be accelerating their applications to join the European Union, particularly Ukraine but also the western Balkan countries, where quite a number of states are well advanced. The European Union has been somewhat too slow in accepting their applications and some member states have held back in agreeing to allowing those countries to join. From a geopolitical perspective, the strongest protection that many countries in the neighbourhood of Russia and the EU have is membership of the European Union. When the Cold War edifice and the Soviet empire collapsed, the people of countries like Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, for the first time ever, had a chance to get into a democratic framework and be part of a wider family of European Union nations. They grasped that opportunity with open arms and that is why many of them joined NATO as well. They did so because of their acute sense of insecurity, which we do not have to the same extent when it comes to Russia. We have no sense of the experience that Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles and Hungarians had at the hands-----

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