Next week I will be in Naples attending a meeting of European Foreign Ministers on Euro-Mediterranean dialogue, involving north and south, and both sides of the Mediterranean including of course the difficult and at times apparently intractable problems of the Middle East. I will announce this officially next week but can tell the Seanad now that the European Parliament has worked with national parliaments of tomorrow's Europe of 25, with the parliaments of all the states in the Middle East and across the southern shores of the Mediterranean to agree to a European-Mediterranean parliamentary assembly. The Oireachtas will be represented there, as will the European Parliament, with the integrity of their political mandates. I would love if during the Irish Presidency we, who are geographically north in Europe, would take up this challenge and be the first to produce such an assembly to establish that we offer solidarity and are connected to the concept of the wider Europe, its new neighbours, old neighbours and its intractable and difficult problems. In that way we would not say to the Mediterranean states, Portugal, Spain, France, Italy and Greece, that is for them because it is their region, but rather that this is an issue for us, because we are committed Europeans.