Seanad debates
Thursday, 10 October 2002
Address by President of the European Parliament.
That is a decent aspiration but political leaders in accession states have been going through a transformation for which I do not know whether we would have had the stomach or neck. They are taking entire industries such as steel and coal in one swoop and telling their representatives they cannot survive in the competitive world and they are moving on. Extraordinary leadership has been provided by a generation of central Europeans and they are looking to us. We will not stop the momentum, but we could damage the moment. The elasticity of the expectations of people in these states is finite and if we stretch it to breaking point, we could release energies and forces mentioned earlier which are another part of Europe's personality.
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