Bertie Ahern
You know we were at a stage where we had trouble every day, we had bombs every day, it was on the world news most days, unfortunately we recall that.
You have to work extremely hard in education programmes to explain and to try to get people to settle in and to assist them.
You can't have it both ways, you can maybe for a while but you can't be a democrat and having a paramilitary organisation and that's the difficulty.
Yes we had really a very open position on citizenship's rights, for the simple reason it didn't arise very much because there was nobody actually coming in.
Yes they're having some difficulties trying to achieve as much as they can as quickly as they can. By the way some of the 10 that joined now have had similar difficulties.
While we're militarily neutral in every sense - closing off a facility which we always gave to a friendly country when all the other countries in Europe that were taking an opposing view also gave facilities would have been an extreme view and one we would not do against a friendly country.
When you have more cultures and more religions and some people who obviously are not very tolerant and want to find arguments and say that you're taking our jobs, you're taking our houses and exaggerate things.
When we joined the European Union we were less than 60% of the GDP of the European Union. I think today we're something like 115% of it. We've had emigration for every year that we ever had.
What we're now stating if somebody is in here for three of the four years before a child is born then they can get citizenship.
What the intergovernmental conference has been doing, what's the convention was doing, which was - first of all I think the convention was enormous.
What are its objectives, what are its aims, what is the treaty base of these, who is responsible for what - we call it competencies - that's what it means, who's responsible for what - and setting them out clearly.
Well you know the historical question in Ireland and her position was that for 150 years, in the time of the great famine in Ireland, our emigration was the issue.
Well we don't have military meetings in Ireland. We do allow American troops to use Shannon, we have always - since we joined the United Nations - we've allowed troops to refuel from Vietnam when they were going to Eastern Europe.
Well we always have referendums in Ireland every time there's a constitution change, so it's something we're very familiar with.
Well there's no doubt about that - people have a right to demonstrate. But George Bush is coming here as the President of the United States, we don't decide who the President of the United States is at any time.
Well the simple answer to that is that the EU only has competence where the EU has competence. If it's a law or a constitution provision that is just for the nation that doesn't change.
Well just in a matter of days we have Poland coming in and many other countries coming in with a huge amount of poor farmers who badly are hoping and looking forward to having subsidies to help them to cope with the changes of the market economy in Europe.
We've now, I think, in the last six years stopped the violence. We've a new generation growing up now who are not living in violence.
We've had - everything's treaty based, the competences of who does what, the role of the European Court of Justice. It is I think, to the ordinary person, difficult and I think.
We've been using our presidency to try to develop and build and unite again from some of the hostilities and some of the difficult moments we had of last year.