THE President of the European Commission, Mr Jacques Santer, yesterday criticised a lack of dynamism and ambitions pitched - too low in vital discussions on the growth of the EU.
Mr Santer, speaking in the European Parliament on the state of the Union, said the Irish presidency was doing its utmost to in eject dynamism into the Inter Governmental Conference (IGC), designed to resolve the problems of enlarging the Union.
A new treaty is to be drawn up between the states and the IGC had been called specifically to bring the EU closer to all its citizens, to make it more efficient and credible.
In Florence the heads of state or government decided to move from the analysis to the negotiation stage. Three months later, rather than facing up to the real challenges of 2000, he sometimes thought that the national governments were using the conference to revive their old proposals.
It was not too late, Mr Santer said. The European Council was meeting in Dublin on October 5th. He called on members to give the negotiations a decisive boost. The EU must stop acting as if it could afford to treat the IGC as a dress rehearsal. There was an urgent need to tackle the inevitable institutional questions associated with an enlarged Union.
Mr Santer said that drugs, violence and organised crime and the sexual abuse and exploitation of the most vulnerable members of society were there to remind them of their responsibilities.
Were they to say there was nothing Europe could do, he asked. The citizen would never understand that the Union could not find truly effective ways of halting these scourges through concerted action at European level. The Commission would not remain on the sidelines.