Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-10-22-Speech-2-227"
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"en.20021022.14.2-227"2
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"On behalf of myself and the Members of the European Parliament, it is a great pleasure to welcome you, Mr President, to our House today. It is an especially great pleasure for me, as an Irish European, in a week when the people have spoken and told the leaders of the fifteen states of the Union that the time for enlargement has come.
Tomorrow you will be back in Hungary to commemorate and celebrate your nation's national day, and to recall the brave Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the proclamation of the republic in 1989. On the floor of our House today stands a very special symbol of that moment – the Hungarian flag raised during that period in 1956.
The martyrs of that 1956 revolution in a way died for Europe and for the values that today, through the enlargement of the European Union, we are now anticipating and creating. And so those people did not die in vain, Mr President, and your being here today is a mark of their contribution to Europe. The values they died for are the values that now unite us across our continent.
Mr President, I have no doubt that your country will be one of our new Member States in 2004. This Parliament was the first of the European institutions to set a clear timetable for enlargement. We want Hungary in the Union and we want your representatives in our Parliament, directly elected by the people of Hungary, for the session starting in the summer of 2004.
What we are now poised to achieve is the direct result of the events of 1989 in which Hungary, once again, played a decisive role. It was Hungary that first agreed to open the iron curtain for people from the former German Democratic Republic waiting in the German Embassy in Budapest for passage to West Germany. One of my own treasured possessions at home in Ireland is a piece of wire cut in August that year on the Hungarian/Austrian border. It symbolises for me the night that Europe has lived through. Enlargement symbolises for me the day ahead of us.
Mr President, I want you to feel at home here. I want you, as the President of your republic, to understand that in being here today on the eve of your national day you are coming home. For the first time on our continent we are creating something powerful and new, through the free will of free and sovereign peoples and on the basis of shared values, not this time at the point of a sword, or at the barrel of a gun. As a young man you studied in Strasbourg; it gives me great pleasure, on behalf of the European Parliament, to ask a man who studied at a student's desk now to speak at a rostrum before the largest directly elected transnational parliament in the world and to share with us our common sense of the Europe in the making."@en1
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