I attended the meeting of the European Council of Heads of State or Government in Lisbon on 26 and 27 June 1992. I was accompanied at the meeting by Deputy Andrews, Minister for Foreign Affairs. Deputy Tom Kitt, Minister of State in my Department with special responsibility for European Affairs, was also part of the Irish delegation.
As the House will be aware, the meeting was concerned essentially with three issues. First on the agenda was the financial perspective for the Community for the period 1993 to 1997. Next, were the prospects for enlargement, with no less than seven countries — Turkey, Cyprus, Malta, Austria, Sweden, Finland and Switzerland at present applying for membership. Then, there were also political co-operation items like the situation in Central and Eastern Europe, and, in particular, the deteriorating conditions in Yugoslavia, and developments in the Middle East. Other areas discussed included the UN Conference on Environment and Development which was held in Rio de Janeiro and the agreement by the Community and its member states to an eight-point follow-up action programme. Ireland was congratulated on the outcome of its recent referendum. The decisions of the Foreign Affairs meeting in Oslo were confirmed. These were that each country should proceed with the process of ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, respecting the timetable to ensure the entry into force of the Treaty as of 1 January 1993, that there should be no renegotiation and that the door for Danish participation remains open.
At Lisbon, there was widespread acceptance that the dangers of creating an anonymous super-State must be avoided and that there must now be instead greater democracy, the citizens of Europe must be more directly involved and the identities and cultures of individual nations more fully reflected in the integration process.
We want to build a socially conscious community of States that accepts difference and diversity. The responsibility for decision-making should be kept at the appropriate level, where it is most effective, and be as close and responsive as possible to the will of the people. In other words, there should be no unnecessary centralisation or harmonisation for its own sake. The Community should undertake only the essential tasks necessary to implement agreed common policies.
One of the underlying principles here is what is called subsidiarity, and this is to be the subject of a report by the Commission to the Summit in Edinburgh next December. This principle of subsidiarity is now enshrined for the first time in the Maastricht Treaty, and we are satisfied that it is defined in a way that will allow for the continued dynamic development of the Community. But we must be vigilant against any attempt to use this principle to dilute Community competence in areas of vital interest to us and to the future development of the Union such as the Common Agricultural Policy, EC control on the level of state aids, and internal market principles.
The Lisbon meeting reviewed progress towards completion of the Single Market. Indeed, we noted that over 90 per cent of the measures needed to implement the market have been adopted. As Deputies will be aware, the Summit re-affirmed its commitment to the completion of the Single Market by 31 December 1992.
We touched on such matters as the Social Chapter of the Maastricht Treaty, the fight against drugs, on which we had a report before us from the European Committee to Combat Drugs; and we agreed with the conclusions of a Report from the "Trevi" Ministers and called for the preparation of a Convention to establish EUROPOL.
The Council welcomed the results of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janeiro from 3 to 14 June and, in particular, the acceptance by the international community at the highest level of the aim of sustainable development worldwide, while protecting our precious environment. We committed ourselves to an eight-point plan.
On the GATT Uruguay Round, which is of vital importance to Ireland, the Council invited the Community negotiators to intensify the dialogue with their partners, and in particular, with the United States, to resolve the remaining differences so that overall agreement can be concluded before the end of the year. Ireland, with its interests in agriculture, and as an exporter of some 70 per cent of its output — among the highest proportions in the world — has an especially large interest in a successful outcome to these talks. But, as the Lisbon meeting underlined, the negotiations form a whole, and success requires a substantial and balanced result in all areas. We noted that the Community has reformed its Common Agricultural Policy on a basis that, while ensuring that the incomes of our farmers are maintained, matches supply better to demand, thus helping to stabilise markets. We called on all parties to the Uruguay Round to show similar flexibility so that realistic and balanced solutions can be found in agriculture and so that tangible liberalisation takes place in the areas of services and access to markets.
Over the past few years, which have seen the collapse of communism, the Community has been looked to as a core of stability by the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The rapid changes in these countries have often been marked by vicious ethnic tensions, the collapse of regimes, the disappearance of national or regional boundaries and the collapse of public administration. The Summit reaffirmed the Community's will to develop its partnership with the countries concerned in their efforts to restructure economies and institutions.
I have had copies of the conclusions of the summit placed in the Dáil Library for reference. As Deputies will note from the document, the talks ranged even more widely than it has been possible to encompass in my brief summary.
Of most immediate concern to Ireland at the Lisbon meeting, were the proposals for the financing of the Community in the period 1993 to 1997. This, in turn, is connected with the proposals for the enlargement of the Community. The European Council in Maastricht, last December, noted that negotiations on accession to the European Union "can start as soon as the Community has terminated its negotiations on own resources and related issues in 1992". This linkage is repeated in the Lisbon conclusions which note that the European Council agreed that the negotiations on accession to the union on the basis of the Maastricht Treaty can start as soon as the Community has terminated its negotiations on own resources and related issues in 1992 and the Treaty on European Union has been ratified. It is quite clear, therefore, that negotiations on enlargement can start only when there is final agreement on the Delors II Package.
I want to stress this point because there seems to have been a view that we should have been able to come away from the Lisbon Summit with agreement on the financial perspectives for 1993 to 1997. I never held that view. In fact, I emphasised, time and again that all that was likely to emerge from Lisbon were guidelines for the negotiation on Delors II. After all, the countries meeting in Lisbon have still to complete their different ratification processes for the Maastricht Treaty: different countries have different concerns and different processes for ratification. Some have referenda; some involve parliamentary action only. But they all have this in common: they are all subject to the most difficult and sensitive debate in their home constituencies. And the Heads of State and Government meeting in Lisbon had to take into account in their approach to all the issues before them, the views of their own parliaments and people. By the time of the Edinburgh Summit, ratification procedures will have been completed or very considerably advanced in most member states and they will be in a better position then to reach final agreement on the proposals contained in the Delors II Package.
In the event, the Summit came to a number of important conclusions. First, they made decisions on the Cohesion Fund, which will assist projects in Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Greece. The fund is referred to in the Maastricht Treaty "to provide a financial contribution to projects in the fields of environment and trans-European networks in the area of transport infrastructure". The Lisbon meeting decided that this fund will be put in place early in 1993. This is an important advance, since Article 130D of the Treaty simply provided that the fund should be set up "before 31 December 1993". Thus, Ireland should benefit from early next year from Community assistance for projects at the particularly advantageous rates of Community aid proposed under this fund.
Next, the Lisbon Council decided that the regressive nature of the current system of contribution to the Community budget will be corrected. Again, this is a step forward since the Cohesion Protocol annexed to the Treaty referred only to examining means of such correction; now we have a commitment that there will be a correction which will take particular account of the situation of the member states with a GNP per inhabitant below 90 per cent of the Community average and will lead to some reduction in Ireland's budget contribution. The Commission will present, in July, its report on the application of the mechanisms for correcting budgetary imbalances, which relates primarily to the UK, although Germany is also affected.
Finally, the Lisbon Council concluded that the cumulated effect of the Structural Funds and the Cohesion Fund will be an increase appropriate to reflect the Maastricht commitments. Again, this is an advance as the Protocol on Cohesion annexed to the Treaty simply referred to a review in 1992 of the appropriate size of the Structural Funds — now we have a commitment to an appropriate increase.
The Commission Paper published earlier this year, From the Single Act to Maastricht and Beyond: The Means to Match Our Ambitions, contains the Commission's proposals for implementing this Treaty obligation. In it, the Commission say:
Given the persistent disparities affecting the least developed regions, the Commission considers that it would be appropriate to allow a further significant increase in Structural Fund assistance — two-thirds in real terms — between 1992 and 1997. Regions in countries covered by the Maastricht Protocol (Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain) would also qualify for assistance from the new Cohesion Fund. This means that for these four countries together, the resources available for the regions in 1997 could rise by as much as 100 per cent.
I quote this passage in extenso to show the basis of the proposals that the flow of Structural Funds and the Cohesion Fund, together, should be doubled in the period from 1993 to 1997, which figured so largely in recent debates. The basis of the understanding is the Commission proposal: that proposal may or not be modified during its progress towards implementation, but I want to make it clear that doubling is a Commission proposal, and that is what Ireland will be seeking in the continuing negotiations.
Just how seriously the Commission take the proposal can I think be gauged from a recent statement by Commission President Delors, as quoted in a profile in Le Monde in its issue of 27 June, and I quote:
If I propose 100, it is not to obtain 40 but to obtain 100.
The same message is repeated in a quotation which I take from the London Times of 29 June, extracted from a Commission bulletin circulated after the Lisbon European Council:
It is likely that the agricultural guideline will be continued and that there will be a doubling by 1997 of the financial effort ... in the four poorer member states.
I make no applogy for following the line I have set out. Deputies will be aware that authoritative Commission estimates show that the increase in Community GNP likely to result from the completion of the internal market and from Economic and Monetary Union is in the order of 15 per cent. The benefits of this increase will accrue to all Community countries but, on all past experience, the greater proportion of the benefit is likely to go to the countries at the Community's core.
These additional benefits are likely to be a multiple, many times over, of the Commission request for additional budget funding — from 1.2 per cent to 1.37 per cent of Community GNP. In our request for additional Structural Funds, we are not shaking the begging bowl: we are simply asking that a small share of the extra benefit to the core countries of the Community resulting from coming economic changes, which Ireland fully and enthusiastically supports, should, through the budgetary mechanisms of the Community, be used to redress the imbalance in competitivity as between the more and less prosperous regions of the Community.
These extra transfers will benefit the central states as well: if we look at the experience between 1980 and, say, 1990, in the development of trade between this country and the other countries of the Community, we can see that development, and even prosperity here can benefit those other countries. What we buy from Britain has almost doubled in that period. In fact, Britain is one of the few countries in the Community with which we run a balance of trade deficit. What we buy from France has doubled, from Germany and Denmark almost trebled and from The Netherlands more than trebled. In other words, Irish prosperity means higher trade volumes for the richer member states: they benefit and we benefit, and the Community is a more stable and cohesive entity. This is not begging bowl politics: it is the logic of the marketplace about which we hear so often in certain circles, and it is based on specific Treaty provisions. As a result of the Lisbon meeting we have not moved back or forward so far as action on this proposal is concerned, but we have secured significant advances on the Cohesion Fund and on the revenue side of the EC budget.
On enlargement, the Council considered that the agreement on the European Economic Area entered into with the EFTA countries, has paved the way for opening negotiations with a view to an early conclusion with those countries seeking membership of the European Union. As I said, the negotiation will be opened as soon as the Treaty on European Union is ratified and the Delors II Package agreed. The basis for the negotiation will be that the applicant countries will join a Community with new characteristics, on the basis of the Maastricht Treaty: it will have completed a Single Market, without internal frontiers; it will have created the European Union; Economic and Monetary Union, with the move to a single currency, will be well underway and there will be a common foreign and security policy, as defined in Maastricht. The accession of the EFTA countries will mean an internal market of 380 million people, held together by common rules of trade, policy and monetary discipline. It will be the largest single trading block in the world: its basic objective will be peace; and it will be anchored firmly in the principles of democracy and the rule of law. They bring with them a diversity of culture and traditions.
An important decision taken by the European Council in Lisbon, after consultation with the President and the Enlarged Bureau of the European Parliament, was to renew the mandate of Mr. Jacques Delors as President of the Commission. This was a decision I favoured and strongly supported, as Mr. Delors has given outstanding leadership in the process of European integration which has acquired a new dynamism since he first took office at the beginning of 1985. He has also shown himself to be a true friend of Ireland who has constantly sought to safeguard and promote the interests of the smaller member states within the Community.
Mr. Delors' new term is for two years, pursuant to the changes in the Maastricht Treaty that aim to make the terms of the Commission and of the European Parliament broadly parallel. In this context, it will be necessary for the Government to nominate the Irish person for appointment as a member of the Commission by the Governments of the member states. There will be no undue delay in making this nomination, but the matter will have to be considered by the Government, following the recent renomination of President Delors.
We had an extensive and detailed discussion on the deteriorating situation in Yugoslavia. The conclusions and annexed declarations set out the Summit's agreed approach to the issue, and to other international questions such as the Middle East peace negotiations, developments in South Africa, the Community's relations with the Maghreb countries of North Africa, and with developing countries generally, and the forthcoming CSCE Summit in Helsinki.
Yugoslavia was a matter of particular concern. The House will be aware that the Community has for the past year been actively engaged in efforts to bring an end to this tragic conflict on our own continent, through a Peace Conference, negotiated ceasefires, the Monitor Mission and support for action by the United Nations. I want to pay tribute to the Irish personnel who are giving such distinguished service to the EC Monitor Mission and to the UN force in Yugoslavia. There have been some successes, particularly in Slovenia and Croatia.
The European Council could not ignore the appalling plight of the people of Sarajevo who have suffered for months without food, water or electricity and have been subject to constant shelling from heavy artillery. Although no party to the conflict can escape blame, by far the greatest share of responsibility falls on the Serbian leadership and the Yugoslav army which it controls. The European Council focused especially on the immediate need to reopen Sarajevo airport to enable food and medicines to get through. We proposed that the UN Security Council should urgently take the measures necessary to open the airport and to deliver humanitarian assistance to the city and neighbouring areas. The Community and its member states declared themselves ready to co-operate in this effort.
While everyone wishes and hopes that these humanitarian objectives can be achieved by peaceful means, the European Council did not include support for the use of military means by the United Nations. Ireland was to the front in ensuring that support for any action of a military kind that might be necessary should be in the framework of the United Nations. We proposed and secured, significant amendments to the Declaration which make this clear, and which were described as "ingenious" by another delegation. I also proposed that the Troika of Foreign Ministers led by Mr. Douglas Hurd representing the new EC Presidency should visit Yugoslavia at an early date, which was also accepted. It was and is my hope that military action by the UN will not be necessary.
Since the meeting of the European Council the signs are encouraging. Serbian forces have withdrawn from the airport and have begun to place their heavy weaponry under the supervision of the UN. The Security Council has agreed to deploy a peacekeeping force to secure the airport. The first consignments of food and medicines have been delivered.
I hope that the lifting of the siege of Sarajevo signals an end to the violence and bloodshed in Bosnia and that the parties to the Yugoslav conflict will now co-operate fully with the UN and resume serious negotiations in the Community's Peace Conference chaired by Lord Carrington. In this connection I salute the courage and initiative of President Mitterrand of France in visiting Sarajevo immediately after the European Council, which had an important and beneficial psychological effect on the situation.
The European Council expressed its deep concern at the recent violence in South Africa and its shock at the massacre on 17 June in Boipalong. There is an absolute need to ensure effective control of the police and security forces in South Africa, and this will be taken up by the ministerial Troika of the Community when they visit South Africa in the near future. Ireland very much supports this. We want to see the conditions created which would enable all the parties to resume negotiations to ensure a peaceful transition towards a democratic and nonracial South Africa. It is vital not to lose the progress already made.
Finally I draw the attention of the House to the adoption by the European Council of a report prepared by Foreign Ministers which identifies areas open to joint action by the European Union vis-à-vis particular countries or groups of countries. This report, which was called for at Maastricht, is annexed to the Council's Conclusions. It outlines how joint action might be applied — when the Maastricht Treaty comes into effect — in the European Union's relation with Central and Eastern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. The Foreign Ministers have been asked to continue their preparatory work of defining the basic elements of the union's policy by the date of entry into force of the Treaty.
The domains within the security dimension, which may form the object of joint action; the CSCE process; disarmament and arms control in Europe, including confidence-building measures; nuclear non-proliferation; and the economic aspects of security, especially exports of arms and technology to third countries; are all subjects which we are happy to see discussed by the union. Most of them have been major preoccupations of Irish foreign policy, and they deal with security in the broadest sense of the term. We are very glad that the Common Foreign and Security Policy should start out in the area of security with these agenda items, and it augurs well for the character and tone of such a policy in the future in contributing to a more peaceful world. The House will note that the report repeats the language of the European Union Treaty included at Ireland's behest to the effect that the policy of the union shall not prejudice the specific character of the security and defence policies of certain member states, a recognition that we are not and do not have to be members of any existing military alliance.
I took the opportunity, in the margins of the meeting, to meet the British Prime Minister. Our discussions covered the European Council meeting, the British Presidency of the Community, which commenced yesterday, and the round-table talks about Northern Ireland. We reviewed the talks process to date and the current situation. I indicated that the Government's agreement to the meeting held earlier this week in Strand Three formation was on the basis that it would help clear the way for Strand Two to commence in line with the statement of 26 March 1991 by the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. We agreed to monitor the process closely and to maintain contact, including a further bilateral meeting in Dublin later this year.
This was the first European Council I have attended as Taoiseach and I look back on it with some satisfaction. Irish interests were promoted and defended both with vigour and with some success in the face of considerable pressure. The outcome should not be measured against the results that we are ultimately looking for, but judged as a stage of the process during which some progress was made in firming up the commitments made at Maastricht, while recognising that the Structural Funds continue to the end of 1993. As a result, we can look forward to a significant increase in EC funding next year. I also made a contribution to the wider agenda, in particular the sending of a peace mission to Yugoslavia.
I would like to convey my thanks to the Portuguese Prime Minister and his administration for the courtesy extended to us at all times during the meeting and for the excellence of the arrangements, which ensured that negotiations which were often tense and difficult, were eased to their conclusion with maximum patience and flexibility. I look forward to a continuation of the discussions and to decisions on the outstanding items at or before the Edinburgh Summit, later this year.