 Thank you very much indeed Dali, Mary and to everybody. Let me start by wishing you all a very happy new year and in particular by wishing every success to the Irish presidency, which is already in day three of the Irish leadership at the helm of the Council of Ministers. I'm going to start my remarks by referring back to the 10th of December last year when I was in Oslo when the European Union was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and for all of us who work on European affairs, it was a very, very moving moment, particularly because the EU is going through such a difficult time. It was wonderfully motivating to have the international recognition of what the EU project stands for, not for the day-to-day difficulties and battles that we face, but for what the whole project stands for. And I was very struck by what the chair of the Nobel Committee said. He said that the EU cannot be taken as a given. It's something that has to be struggled for every day. And believe me, it is a struggle every day. But on a moment like that when the international community is saying we want the European project to succeed, we believe that the contribution it has made to peace in the world is hugely important. That is, I think, a moment that will certainly stay in my memories to the end of my life. But saying that the EU is not a given, that you can take it for granted, is very true because the EU is an unfinished project. It's not a journey to a known or agreed destination and once you get there then you can say it's complete. It's much more something that's evolving over time and that has to respond to what Europe needs now and in the future as much as having been built on what Europe needed in the past and when the whole project was started after the Second World War. I think it's especially true at the current time because in fact a new EU is being fashioned out of the crisis that we're going through. The way I see it is that the complacency that we had for the last 15 or 20 years has been swept away. I think we thought we could stay at a point where we had something between national decision making and a little bit of EU as an add-on. I think that has been swept away. It's now clear that that's not possible and it's only now that the real consequences for many member states of being in a currency union are actually being understood. Today I think we're also at a moment when what we all took for granted as the irreversibility of the EU is also being seriously questioned and that's for the first time in a long time. Some will not wish to integrate further and some even think that they have a choice still about not integrating further. But I think that we will live for the next several years in a period of transition having outgrown the way that we were before the crisis but not yet having grown into the shape of how the union will be in the future. If we look back on what's happened in the last four years, huge decisions have been taken during the crisis to give the EU a fund to intervene when member states get into difficulty that we never had before, to completely overhaul the financial sector, the regulation of the financial sector, to give the EU a bigger say ex ante in national budget and policy making and these were big decisions that were taken in the heat of the crisis because they had to be taken. But they were big decisions that I think are still not well understood. I would say not even fully understood by everyone who participated in taking them and certainly not fully understood by the general public and I'll come back to the problem that that creates in a moment. But I think that it's clear that even though huge decisions have been taken it isn't enough and it's not enough for one very simple reason. National decision making cannot and does not take into account the real interdependence particularly of countries that are in a common currency union but I would say even of the interdependence between all member states of the European Union and we have seen graphically the impact that bad policy making in one part of the union can have on all of the rest of the union. But it's clear that we cannot go on with the belief that national decision making and economic policy is enough. It can't be left to the national level alone but we're not yet at a point where we have a level of EU decision taking that is in keeping with a common currency. So that's an inherently unstable point. And my conclusion from that analysis would be that we have to go forward inevitably to a deeper level of integration. I think it's very clear that the new EU that I spoke about emerging from the crisis is going to be built around the euro and I think that for two reasons. One is because it's the currency of the union, that's what the treaty says. We have two member states that have an opt-out. At the moment we have 17 in the euro, 10 not in the euro but most of those who are not in the euro want to and will join and that's not going to be a stable state for too long. But the second reason why I believe that the new union will be built around the euro is because it's existential. The euro, the political decision is clearly taken that the euro will survive because we will do everything that it needs that has to be done to make it survive and we cannot afford not to do it. So for those two reasons the euro will be the core of the future EU and I think it's important that we see it in that way because it's a key to understanding a lot of the decisions that are going to be taken in the next few years. I think we are beginning to convince not only ourselves but the wider world that the euro is irreversible. Greece will not leave and will not be thrown out of the euro. I think London has gone from worrying about how to cope with the breakdown of the euro to how to cope with the survival of the euro to a whole different ball game because now the question is what will be the impact of a strong euro in the future and where will it have its financial centre. I think convincing everyone that the euro is irreversible is a very important part of breaking the link between bank debt and sovereign debt and that has been the issue that has bedeviled Ireland and other parts of the union in this current crisis. We need to do a lot more to put the right policies and instruments in place to regain confidence and to get back to growth but I think that from everything that has been decided in the last few years you can see that the political decision has been and we have followed through on that that the leaders of the European Union will do whatever it takes to support the euro in the future. This means that the next steps in integration will be to put a banking union in place for the euro. A very important decision was made by the Council of Ministers just before Christmas to set up a single supervisor for the euro area. That should then be followed by agreement on a single resolution mechanism which in simple terms means that the banks and the shareholders will have to pay in future to bail out the banks, not the taxpayers. The third leg of a long-term banking union will be and this I say with much more caution a common deposit guarantee mechanism. I think that even those who are calling for that kind of mechanism at the moment haven't really factored in the degree of intrusion in domestic decision making that would be required before some governments will agree to that level of debt mutualisation but that's the kind of scenario of what a banking union would be made up of. We need to do this because if you look back you can see that we were not well prepared for the crisis when it hit. We didn't have the instruments in place, the ones I talked about a moment ago. This is now being remedied of course but we also need a vision for the future. We need to have some sense of where we're going and that's why in November the commission published what we called a blueprint on economic and monetary union. I think it's important that I say that we're not asking anyone to adopt this blueprint, it's the commission's view of where we should go, what needs to be done in order to build economic and monetary union. But although we're not asking people to adopt it I think it will be a reference point for years to come because it's a very thorough piece of work setting out what the next steps should be, what can be done under the current treaty, what cannot be done under the current treaty and will require treaty change in the future. Not for another few years I hope, but certainly in the future. I think it's also interesting to see that the report that the President of the European Council, President van Rumpij, brought out in December is very compatible with the commission's blueprint. They're very largely going in the same direction and his report was done of course working very closely with the commission but also with the ECB. So you can see that the main European institutions are all thinking in the same direction, thinking along the same lines. Having said that it's also very clear that most governments are still thinking short term and are not ready to sign up to big long term visions at least not right now. I think the December European Council showed very clearly that Member States need time to digest what they have already decided, they feel they've done a lot and they have and they're hoping now that the pace will slow down a little bit. I'm not sure that that's going to be a hope that will be fulfilled. I think there is a danger of complacency as soon as the pressure from the markets has lessened people feel oh we don't have to make these difficult decisions let's just sort of slow everything down. And I think if we don't show that we are determined to continue and to put in place the instruments, the mechanisms, the policies and the way of deciding together that we need and then the markets will lose faith again and will punish us again. But having said that the Member States are not prepared to sign up now to a big future vision, they are willing to take the next steps because I think their collective experience of the crisis has been that we have got to continue to put in place the policies and the instruments that we need. And so I think what the Commission tried to do in the blueprint, what President Van Remphe has done in his report, is to set out the next steps and their sequencing so that we do things in the right order, that people know what's coming next and that they can see individual proposals in a wider context of leading towards eventual full economic and monetary union. And I have to say I have a lot of understanding for the heads of state and government who feel that it's been very intense for years and that they would like a bit more breathing space. I think one of the unfortunate side effects of the drama and the focus almost exclusively on saving the euro has been that it has absorbed almost all the political time and energy. And there hasn't been the attention needed to the growth agenda. And I'm hoping that as the situation is stabilising now that that same energy and determination can be put into the growth agenda. It will be a long haul. Unemployment levels go up very quickly but they come down very slowly. And there's no money around for stimulus packages. You can see in each Member State but also you can see at European level the difficulty we are having in fixing the next financial perspective which is still only going to be about 1% of EU GDP but the difficulties around agreeing on that show that there is not going to be money around for stimulus packages. So we will have to find the political will to continue to invest in structural reform to create the opportunities that we need to get Europe growing again. And there is an ongoing need for deep structural reform whether it be in education and training in skills and matching what people learn to what the marketplace needs to investing in research to investing in clean energy all of the things that everybody can think of. We will have to find the political will to open up the opportunities that are there in order to get Europe growing again. I think another area where it's obvious that Europe has to find the political will is to conclude new international trade agreements. They are always difficult. It's very difficult for 27 soon 28 countries to have exactly an identity of interest and to be able to conclude the agreements but it's clear that a lot of future European growth should come from outside of the European Union. So these are just some of the areas where I think we need to continue to find the political will to invest in the growth for the future. And this is going to come to my last point. I think that we can find the political and the economic skills and policies that we need but the biggest questions that the Union faces are of course the political ones. And we need to answer difficult questions in the next two to three years. The biggest difficulty I think is going to be finding the right answer to how can we keep the EU together. How can we handle faster integration by some member states, those that are in the Euro but not all because not all have an obligation or want to be in the Euro. How can we handle this? I think the current debate in the UK and with the UK is something that everybody is following very closely. I think that there are some promising signs that business in the UK is beginning also to say well hang on a minute you know don't we need to think this through in a deeper way and more rationally. And I think we need to manage that situation very carefully and not to have any self-fulfilling prophecies. I touched on a moment ago the question of the political will that we need to make the deep structural change that Europe needs to be able to not only survive in the age of globalization but to come out strong in the era in which we live. Will we be able to find the collective determination to keep making those changes once the fierce heat of the crisis has abated somewhat? These are political questions, they're not technical. And perhaps the biggest question of all is how are we going to persuade our fellow EU citizens that a further transfer of sovereignty to the EU level in their interest? I think part of the debate that's coming will have to be about power sharing between the EU level and the national level. I think that we will have to look again at whether we've got the right balance of what's decided at EU level and what's decided nationally. And I think that we have to have a debate about what kind of EU do we want? At the moment the European Union is getting a lot more and tougher powers on the economic side. Do we want the EU and the EU institutions only to be the police? So to sit in judgement on what member states are doing and to meet out the punishment when they don't do what they've committed to. But if we want the EU to be involved in a wider range of policies than that then we will have to have a debate about how do we want the EU and to what extent do we want the EU involved in policies like social policy, health policy, educational policy. All of these are intensely political and public issues. And I'm struck by the public comment here and in other programme countries on the involvement of the Troika. There's a lot of criticism, a lot of resentment. That shows that this will not be an easy debate to have in the coming years, but we will have to have it. And then the question of how can we ensure greater democratic accountability and legitimacy? We'll have to find the right way to connect with the population. And the population we're talking about is 500 million people so it's not easy to connect with them as individuals. We will have to make sure that we have accountability at the right level. It's easy to say that when things are decided at EU level the accountability should be at EU level and when they're national they should be national. But defining that clearly in a way that the public understands and supports is not going to be simple. Of course out of all of this I think there inevitably will be an even greater role for the European Parliament but there's also a big question about what then is the role of national parliaments and how can they be involved in that mix of EU level policymaking national policymaking and where the two come together. So I think there is a need for an informed debate and a debate which will be as profound in its own way as the decision Ireland took 40 years ago to join the European Union and the decision Ireland took when it joined the precursor of what became the euro. And that debate will also have to include serious discussions about the alternative because it's very easy to say we don't want any more of that we don't want any more integration and we have enough, thanks very much. So what's the alternative? My basic thesis is that we can't stay where we are now we have to go deeper. So how do we bring people along with us to understand that and support it and not feel that something is being taken away that something additional is being gained? And I think that that is a debate that has to be had it wasn't had during the heat of the crisis because all the attention was absorbed on making the decisions now those decisions have to be explained to the public people have to feel comfortable with them and ready to move on to the next level. And that's where I just wanted to say a few words to close about the Irish presidency. I think that it is highly symbolic that Ireland takes up the presidency 40 years to the day after we joined as a very different country with very high hopes of what EU membership would bring and hopes which I think have been very largely delivered if not surpassed. Now is a difficult time but if you look back over 40 years all of us who are old enough to have been adult at the time remember what a different country Ireland was and how much more confidence and possibilities we have now that we didn't have then. And I think that the presidency will put a spotlight on Ireland I know that that's the determination of the government and the civil service is to really showcase what Ireland can do Ireland coming back out of a programme and making a very big success of its presidency and there are very high hopes for the Irish presidency in Brussels as well we've always had successful presidencies the seventh one I'm sure will be the most successful of all and people look for a particular Irish style of efficiency and drive and at the same time respect for all member states big and small and I think that Ireland, the Irish presidency can actually make a difference to the growth agenda I was talking about there are quite a lot of proposals on the table of the council and the parliament that need a push these opportunities that I was talking about which don't cost money but which can open opportunities that decisions are taken I think that's where the Irish presidency of different councils and the Irish interaction as presidency with the European parliament can actually try to build a momentum and a feeling that yes we're coming out of the crisis growth can return this can be the year when the momentum comes back so I look forward of course particularly to seeing the home team playing every day in Brussels but I think that there's a particular contribution that Ireland can make now they can't solve all the problems of course but they can set a different rhythm of different expectations and put growth and coming back to a better time at the heart of the agenda so to conclude let me just briefly say the following of course it will take years for Europe to come fully out of this crisis it took years to build up it can't be undone overnight we will not go back to where we were before the crisis no matter how often I say that I'm still surprised by the number of people who think that we will we will not we will be in a different world I think you will see gradually a newly shaped up and a stronger European union emerge it will be more integrated that deeper integration will be built around the euro we will have to have a more clear division between what's decided at EU level what's decided nationally and it will not be straight forward progress it's not going to be one step after the other it's going to be more of a zigzag and a larch every now and again but I think the direction of travel is clear I think that it's clear also that more responsibility will have to go hand in hand with more solidarity and that requires a public political debate about what kind of EU do we want to have in the future at some point we will come to the conclusion that we have to change the treaty but that should be preceded by a debate about what kind of EU do we want to have it should not be a technical legal constitutional debate the treaty should be the transference into legal and constitutional terms of the outcome of that debate and we should get it the right way around this time round first of all have the debate and then put it into a treaty not start by saying we need to change the treaty and so what are we going to put in it I don't think that there will be a treaty change process before 2015 but that's not that far away I think that we can take a lot of the decisions we have to take in the coming months and years under the existing treaty but at some stage in the future in order to go further with the kind of integration that I think will be required we will have to change the treaty in the future and for that to happen there really has to be a well informed public debate not only here in Ireland but in lots of other countries where there will also be referendum so I'll conclude by saying I think it's an absolutely fascinating time for Ireland to be at the helm I think I look forward very much to seeing Irish ministers and Irish civil servants chairing, compromising, wheeler dealing in the way that only we can do and I look forward if you do invite me back at some stage in the future maybe to doing a retrospective of the Irish presidency thank you very much