Taoiseach Bertie Ahern warned yesterday against comment that was "extremely pessimistic as to the future of Europe".
"The reality is that since the fall of the Iron Curtain the European Union has experienced unprecedented growth. It has more than doubled its membership. It has created a single currency. It has greatly enhanced its single market.
"The key challenge for Europe following the recent referendum results is to maintain the momentum of that success. Europe in this context faces a number of real challenges," he said in Dublin yesterday.
Mr Ahern was speaking at a conference on the theme "The Future of Europe - uniting vision, values and citizens?" organised by the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice and the Jesuit quarterly Studies.
He noted the EU was open only to states where democracy and the rule of law were a given. "It is worth recalling that, were one to select one 70-year-old citizen from each of the member states, only two - the Irish person and the Swede - would have lived in a country which has not known dictatorship, foreign aggression or invasion during his or her lifetime," he said.
The general secretary of ICTU, David Begg, told the conference that if the proposed EU Services Directive becomes reality, "then the grotesque Irish Ferries scenario will become the norm". The proposed directive amounted to a "charter for social dumping" and would result in a huge loss of properly paid jobs.
"If anybody was in any doubt as to the impact of this crazy proposition - the Services Directive - they need look no further than Irish Ferries. The chief executive of Irish Ferries earned €687,000 last year. But he wants to dump 543 workers and replace them with people on around €3 per hour. . . there's something deeply obscene about that. This should serve as a wake-up call for legislators at a national and EU level."
Mr Begg said it was obvious from the recent referendums on the EU constitution that the attempt to "dismantle the European social model and take us down the slippery slope of neoliberalism" had failed.
However, the senior Europe editor with the Economist Intelligence Unit, Dan O'Brien, said that within the EU "more market and less state intervention will make [ for] a more prosperous and fairer society".
He said "the perception that Ireland has become more unequal during the Celtic Tiger years, whether perpetuated wittingly or unwittingly, is simply not supported by the evidence."
Former EU commissioner and Gatt/World Trade Organisation director general Peter Sutherland said the rejection of the EU constitution in France and the Netherlands had incorrectly been interpreted as votes against European integration and against further enlargement, particularly in regard to Turkey.
"The bottom line should surely be that there is an existing commitment to negotiations. These will take many years to conclude and only then will it be possible to judge whether Turkey could or should be a full member," he said.
Other speakers at the conference included the director general of the Institute of European Affairs, Alan Dukes; Prof Brigid Laffan, vice-president of UCD; and broadcaster David McWilliams. The conference was chaired by John Bowman.