Winning Speech in the 2005 Public Speaking Competition: Mercy College Mounthawk

Caoimhe Casey

The single market unsurprisingly is not the place where you could hook up with a single young man or women. Rather, according to Title II Article 3 of the Treaty of the European Union, it is “an internal market characterised by the abolition between Member States of obstacles to the free movement of goods, people and services” etcetera, etcetera. Which basically means that anyone and anything can go wherever they want.

It is the backbone of the EU having created 2.5 million jobs and €800 billion since 1993. But, do we want the EU to be just a single market or do we, as was the intention of the 2004 Constitution, want it to be more than that. Sure there is current disagreement over the shape of political institutions. But our team believes that there is certain shared and agreed principles, which push the EU to be more than a market. Emily will discuss the principle of social cohesion while Sarah will explore cultural aspects of the European Union.

I will now focus on the aspiration towards a common foreign policy. The EU could just trade away happily whilst ignoring our global responsibilities but I think it shouldn’t. However, to exercise a global influence Europe needs to speak with one voice.

The EU is at present addressing the social justice agenda relation to developing countries by opening its single markets to Least Developed Countries. The Everything But Arms programme provides for unrestricted access quota and tariff free for all products and goods from the Least Developed Countries to EU markets which I believe is a piece of positive discrimination from the social justice agenda in relation to global security. Perhaps then, Tony might actually have to consult with somebody before running away with George!

The EU is at present trying to create a rapid response force where each participating country would have a group to be ready to go to a troubled country within 48 hours and help with peace-keeping. If we had had such a force, maybe the Balkans situation would not have exploded when it did.

A more immediate crisis in my opinion is that of the environment and here too Europe is finding its voice. In the face of market pressure, the 2004 Constitution outlines the Union’s objectives to work for the sustainable development of Europe based on a high level of protection of the environment. Again Europe is moving beyond a market. In fact Europe has agreed to undertake to exceed the five per cent limit under the Kyoto protocol and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by eight per cent during the period 2008 to 2010. This is the voice of Europe leading the world in environmental issues which we must all listen to, even my humble self. I now even consider rinsing out empty milk bottles and separating my rubbish and I often do.

Ladies and Gentlemen, do we really want the EU to be just a single market? As  Yeats put it, do we want to “fumble in the greasy till” and “add the half-pence to the pence until we have dried the marrow from the bone”. I think the EU should be more than a single market. We should have a Common Foreign Policy and a single voice – a voice that calls on us all to entire responsibility of the globe.

Thank You.

Emily Brick

Fellow Europeans, back in ’73 when Jack Lynch signed the Treaty of Rome, Ireland was an economic backwater.  Our best and brightest were jumping on the planes to get out of the place. A short thirty-three years later and we are the toast of Europe, the Celtic tiger no less.

But Ladies and Gentlemen my team and I believe that market forces alone did not create the Celtic Tiger. A more important contributing factor was Europe’s social policies of regional development, structural and cohesion funds.

We have known Europe for a long time that we are a lot more than just a single market. We dropped the “European Economic Community” title ages ago and for very good reason. Even our economic policies themselves have been transformed by our social agenda beyond a concern for market profit into vehicles for achieving social development in Europe.

A case in point is the Common Agricultural Policy or the Cap as it is better known. This is as important to the EU as Gaelic football in the County Kerry - a small matter of life and death. Farming is a shared heritage in the EU – not just an economic practice but a way of life. As the bedrock of European society, it has always been heavily subsidised.

The Cap has forty-four per cent of the EU’s budget. To economists this must appear as economic lunacy paying farmers for setting fields aside but thankfully for those of us who live in the countryside, the EU aspires to be more than just a market. The EU’s social and economic policies have sustained thriving rural communities from Knocknagashel to Thessalina to Extremadura.

If it were not for the €166 million received by Ireland for what we know as Community Initiatives, then the sheep would make up the majority of West Coast! Take the  €2.8 million of EU funds channeled through Tuatha Chiarraí Teo. Because of this we have training for the management of community and volunteer groups. We have a state of the art community centre where Mother and Toddler meetings take place as well as the over 55 club and my own youth club. It gives communities a chance to survive.

By 2007 there will be twenty-seven Member States in the EU and the new states find themselves in the exact same position that we in were back in 1973. The question is do we extend to them the same chance that we got.

Oh, the blinkered economists among us will argue that rich countries will loose out if more countries join. They have a point. Already for instance Lithuania and Latvia have a GDP of only thirty-five to forty per cent of the Union average and this does put a strain on the EU budget. Agricultural spending to 2013 may require a cut in subsidies of five per cent to finance new members. So are the economically minded correct? Should we pull back?

No. I believe the EU should not waver on its social policy. We must continue bridging the income gap between the richest and poorest regions of the EU and improve quality of life for all citizens. Ladies and Gentlemen, we are more than a market of traders “fumbling in the greasy till”. We have a social agenda in the EU which we can be proud of. Let’s maintain this agenda into the future. Thank you.

Sarah O’Carroll

Bonjour, Dia Dhaoibh, Buenos días señores y señoras.

As Caoimhe indicated, our team believes there are certain values that drive the EU to be more than a single market. Have we forgotten why the EU was set up in the first place? In the 1950s, compelled by the destruction of World War Two, European leaders become convinced that the only way to secure a lasting peace was to unite Europe economically and politically. As Winston Churchill put it, why should there not be a European group which could give a sense of enlarged patriotism.

The EU was always envisaged as more than just a market with a cultural and political dimension, which is still relevant today. The success of the single market has led to a huge interspersion of ethnic peoples across the continent setting a clear challenge of integration. In our own back garden have we not sensed a racial undercurrent in the treatment of foreign workers? Have we not heard the resentment over 40,000 Polish workers taking our jobs, even though we pay them less anyway?

We no longer have worry about France going to war with Germany. Our concern now is the possibility of racial unrest within our own towns and cities. Irony of ironies, to meet the integration challenges caused by the single market, the EU should be more than that single market.

In my opinion there should be a cultural and a legal dimension. There is an excellent legal structure already in place in the EU to protect these migrant workers. But I think the EU must try and promote a sense of common culture as well.

To my mind they don’t seem to be making a very good job of this. It’s not that there isn’t enough money being thrown at it. The “Culture 2000” programme had a budget of €230 million. Sure Cork was the capital of culture like! But how successful was that European identity among the ordinary Transition Year students in the room today. Maybe we should have more popular events like a European St Paddy’s day or even a Europe Bank Holiday, if the single market could bear to close for a day.

I believe another approach is to bring down the language barriers. In 2003, the European Commission unveiled an action plan for the promotion of language learning and linguistic diversity and has the main goal of encouraging Europeans to know at least two languages in addition to their maternal tongue. Yet the challenge of integration is a difficult one in the face of the linguistic patriotism displayed by Jacques Chirac who stormed out of a recent European Summit when a French business leader had the audacity and the bare cheek to speak in English.

If language is such a bone of contention, perhaps we can move to sport because it engages and appeals to people from all walks of life. Interestingly, the proposed EU Constitution, Article III 282 suggests that sport becomes a way to develop and a culture of cooperation and a sense of common European pride.

However we do it Ladies and Gentlemen, whatever methods we employ, we must accept what my team and I have argued here today, that hidden within the dynamics of the single market are the very seeds which drive the EU to be more than just that market. I have argued that there must be a cultural agenda to the EU.

Emily has shown that the EU is moved beyond market forces social and cohesion policies and to sustain a market globally we have been pushed to develop a common foreign policy as Caoimhe has outlined. Ladies and Gentlemen, let us “come to sense”. The EU must do more than “add the halfpence to the pence”. We must be more than a single market now and in the future. Thank You.