Tom Morrissey (Progressive Democrats)

I am delighted to be a Member of this House and feel privileged to be able to take part in this debate. I come before this House today to urge the Irish people to vote "Yes" to Nice. This referendum has been referred to by the Taoiseach as being a crossroads, and he is right, but it is much more than that.

Nice is the gateway to a new Europe, to a new peace and a new, undiscovered future, a future that not long ago would have been unimaginable. Cast your mind back through the mists of time, contemplate our shared European history. It is a terrible scene, centuries of hatred and unrelenting war as in each generation the armies of Europe marched. The age of kings gave way to the wars of the age of enlightenment, on down through the era of revolution, each stage more bloody than the one before until we reached the nadir of the European experience – the horrors of the trenches in 1914-1918 and the genocide of the Hitler years.