Quotes
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.
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.