Ireland has successfully cultivated a positive image of a young, dynamic country bringing to the European table a thousand years of cultural and literary heritage, and a more recent history of political and military domination which reduced us to the status of a Third World country within the European family. I do not think I will be challenged when I say that, since entry to the European Union, we have become a First World country within Europe. Are we prepared to throw away this carefully constructed relationship with our EU partners, all of which have agreed to the articles of the Nice treaty? They have done this in the interests of all European peoples, but especially those of the former colonies of the Soviet Union, which is what the countries concerned were.