Joe O'Toole (Independent)

We should express our thanks to the Taoiseach for giving of his time here again this afternoon. I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Treacy, to the debate. I appreciate his being here. I am sure he will take back what we have to say.

This kind of debate, with five minute contributions, is lively and good. I have listened to it in my office for the past hour and it flowed quite well. It is a tight timeframe but it is good. We should have more such debates.

I was in France this year on the day of the referendum on the European constitution. That night I met five people who told me they had voted against the European constitution, which was not surprising. The surprising piece was contained in the next sentence of each of them. Each one of the five was in favour of the European constitution but they all had voted against it for different reasons. There are two lessons to be learned. Senator Mooney is correct. My history teacher in Dingle long ago always said that the most powerful person in a referendum was the one who wrote out the question, and he was so correct. If the question is wrong, the answer will never be correct.

In future we should hold a series of referenda, not just one referendum on something so complicated. I realise this is a terrible future to behold but if one does not take an aspect of the European constitution — I agree with the point made about calling it a constitution, which it is not, but one may call it what we wishes — and put that part to the people for stated reasons, then we will get a result similar to those received on many occasions. In the past three referenda we got this coalition of extreme right and extreme left. We got people who had nothing in common coming together opposing it and we made it easy for them to do so. We should not do that again. One thing we should do is break down the issues and deal with them one by one.

In that regard, we should observe how people perceive Europe. On the point Senator McDowell made earlier, people see themselves as European. They are comfortable being European, whatever that is. One does not hear people in the pub saying that we want to get out of Europe. It is not happening there and that is not where the debate is taking place.

The Taoiseach made reference to Turkey. The Turkish issue is a classic example of that of which I speak. There is a huge majority against Turkey's accession and I could give at least six reasons for this. First, it is a Muslim state and a considerable number of European Christians are opposed to the idea of a Muslim state joining the European Union. These Christians will never say so but that is what they believe. Second, a significant number of racists do not want these Asians. There are the geographers who will tell us that Turkey is not part of Europe, which finishes at the Dardanelles. There are also the people who are worried about the size of Turkey. Then there are workers who are genuinely worried about their jobs if 70 million people suddenly become available to the European workforce. These are different objecting groups and they must be dealt with one by one. Then there is the issue of Cyprus. Did anyone else note that during the debate on whether the EU would start the accession talks with Turkey two weeks ago there was no mention of Turkey's attitude towards Cyprus? The idea of an EU member state which did not fully recognise another EU member state would be untenable. In fairness, Turkey has made more moves than Cyprus in trying to alleviate that. The House will recall that the referendum on that island last year was accepted by the Turkish end and rejected by the other end, contrary to all expectations a year earlier. We must look at these issues and also tell the Turkish authorities that they keep doing everything wrong. They deal with every problem the wrong way. They should just simply recognise what they must do. They should out-wit and out-strategise the people who are delighted to see them making errors.

There are issues about Europe that bother people. The euro has been the greatest success story of the European Union and people like it. The aspect of the European Union that has driven people mad is, as I mentioned here this morning, that we no longer can have local market producers. Such markets exist in every other place in Europe. Every small town in France has such a market where people may sell their own vegetables. Each day in north Dublin people dump the kind of vegetables that are polished up in Provence and presented as being perfect. They would not be allowed on the Dublin market because they do not meet European Union legislation regulations. The position is the same as regards meat, the VRT on cars and credit cards. I cannot get my credit card at the cheapest place in Europe because we are tied by the regulations. Why can I not transfer euro from one country to another without undergoing an extraordinarily difficult, expensive and complex procedure with different banks?

Many Irish people travel abroad two or three times each year. Why must they queue up at customs? Why do we not say "Goodbye" to the British, as we did in the case of the euro, and buy into the Schengen Agreement? The situation is too complex and complicated so we should take the next step and move on. These are some of the steps we could take to make people more at ease and bring forward the principles of the Treaty of Rome, namely, free movement of people, labour and capital.