Seanad debates

Tuesday, 10 June 2003

Convention on the Future of Europe: Statements.

 

Countries as powerful as France, Germany and the United Kingdom must be willing to accept that occasionally they will find themselves holding a minority opinion and must act accordingly. The treaty imposes a serious moral and legal obligation on individual countries to co-operate with others in terms of foreign policy. That is a good provision and I acknowledge that it cannot be taken any further now. We should explicitly state that we will have to go further, in time, if it is to be meaningful. It is not enough simply to impose, for the moment, a moral obligation which the United Kingdom clearly feels entirely happy to ignore. The reform that will be involved in putting in place a foreign minister will count for nothing if we do not have a policy that means something.

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