Bertie Ahern
We're the presidency of the European Union, we would show the same respect to anybody, of any political persuasion.
We're a country that's very good friends in very good relationships with the United States and our census say that there's 44 million Irish in the United States and they've always been very friendly to us in all our hours of need and we've had many over our history.
We took support of the United Nations throughout the period while we were on the Security Council and in a period of all the negotiations pre the war we would have liked a clear UN mandate before any action took place, that didn't happen.
We now have in the United States I think they've 60,000 Chinese students in the United States at the moment, in Ireland we've 38,000. So we're a very small country.
We have now experienced in the last number of years an increasing number of Eastern Europeans coming to Ireland - Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia - in large numbers, we've an enormous amount of Polish workers now in many areas - financial services, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, in agriculture.
We have just completed, in the Irish presidency, a very radical reform of the Common Agricultural Policy and the whole mechanism of how farmers in Europe will be paid from next January.
We have institutions, we have a system, people have to pledge by rules and as in any democracy then you have to live by those rules.
We have coped well with this. You have to keep some control.
We had negative growth most of the time and there were difficult times when we joined Europe, times of coping with the changes.
We had Irish colleges all over France and Germany hundreds of years ago. Other nationalists have been moving around. I think the concept of people working together is as old as anything you want to visualise.
We had an abuse of our constitution where people were coming to Ireland, having a baby, some of them leaving immediately and then claiming EU citizenship in other countries.
We had a procedure that a referendum commission had to equally put the arguments for and against.
We had a huge number of deaths as we now see in the Middle East. And people have to work together and we never would have sorted it out militarily, we had to try and find a new accommodation. And while we're not there yet at least we don't have the difficulties that are there.
We are very much basing the bait around multilateralism, where we all must work together and get the United Nations back centrally involved.
W e did change the referendum procedure where both sides were put under state money.
Unfortunately there still is conflict and there still is a lot of hostility and there still is breaches of what would be the norm of civilised society elsewhere. Thankfully we do not have the level of killing and bombing and mayhem that we had for 30 years. We still have a job to do.
They've brought in huge justice and home affairs reforms. There are doubts about some of the issues about whether the reforms will be fully implemented but we can understand that - I think it takes time for these things to happen.
They do not want to be ruled from London. They want to rule their own system in those areas that they have again the powers to do it and I think we all have to help them. And Prime Minister Tony Blair and I are very committed to trying to deliver that for them.
They are making progress, they have to, everybody has to follow the same system, they have to comply with the same regulations and they have to comply with the various criteria.
There's no restrictions insofar as you're not going to democratically stop people from wanting to put in money, which I think is what he would like me to do, which I won't.