I want to touch on a number of themes about the moment we are living through as Irish Europeans and in the European Union. We are on the threshold of 2004, a year of renewal and redefinition for the European project. It will be a year of renewal because the European Union will grow from 15 to 25 states. In a certain way we will fulfil two powerful visions from two very different sources in the act of realising that enlargement. One, I recall, was the first visit paid by the current Pontiff, Pope John Paul II, to his native land in Poland in 1978, when he said he believed that our old Continent would never really heal earlier injury if it could not breathe fully with its two lungs, east and west. Next year we will breathe on those two lungs. The other vision is to be found in the seminal speech in May 1950 by the then French Foreign Minister, Robert Schuman, which set out the thinking on new European institutions for the foundation states of European integration after the Second World War. Inside all of those institutional ideas was one big value, that of creative reconciliation. For our generation of Europeans, 1 May 2004 will be the most powerful generational act of creative reconciliation that our Continent has seen in our lifetime. The second act of renewal and redefinition is that we will have a new constitutional treaty, not yet ratified, but already available in the public market place of ideas and debate as we move into 2004.