Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-05-31-Speech-3-033"
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"en.20060531.9.3-033"2
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".
Mr President, I would like to thank the Prime Minister for coming and for starting what is a very important debate, despite the fact that I would not agree with some of his ideas and conclusions.
The essence of the best idea and the best debate is when you have divergent opinions, coming together to try and garner the best from the situation. A number of key elements that were mentioned by the Prime Minister in his speech are deserving of more in-depth analysis and comment. However, if I may be so bold, I would like to touch on two or three elements.
With regard to the situation of whether or not the people want
Europe or
Europe, I would never dare to speak on behalf of all the people of Europe. However, I can speak on behalf of the people in my constituency in the south-west of Ireland, whom I met last weekend. Out of the 4500 people I met last week in Ireland, 3000 of them brought up issues of European concern that they wanted to see solved. Amazingly enough, for all the issues that they brought up, they saw that the best way of getting a solution was at a European level – not at a national level – because they saw there was a bigger picture involved. These issues involved the environment, fisheries, free trade and so on. They saw their best hope of advancement on all of these issues coming from a European level.
People
want more Europe in certain areas, but if you tell people in the world, or people in Europe, or people in my country, that they will be part of a European army; that their taxes will be determined by Brussels; that they will have no say with regard to what kind of a police force they will have, they will reject it out of hand. This is not because they dispute the argument or the veracity or the genuineness of the argument put forward, but because they see those as red-line issues. They see those as issues that are best dealt with by the people in their own country.
One of the most important issues we have to discover is not to go down the simple road of saying ‘you are either for a federal Europe or against it’. Personally, I am against a federal Europe. The kind of model that has been successful for Europe has been one that we have created ourselves. It is not something that has been copied from some other model. It has been a creation out of necessity – the necessity that we now face before us. You touched on it yourself, Prime Minister, during your own questions concerning economics and other areas. The discussion is now taking place. Decisions will have to be taken at some stage in the short term, not in the long term, and such decisions will subsequently need to be properly implemented.
The Foreign Ministers in Vienna last week were correct when they said it was wrong to call this document a Constitution, because it is not a true Constitution in its right form. Call it a
for a new Europe, but not a
for a new Europe."@en1
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"Constitution"1
"Treaty"1
"do"1
"less"1
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