The situation in the North is not peculiar to us and the Northern peace process and experience in negotiating the Belfast Agreement gave Ireland an understanding of sectarian violence and ethnic tensions in other parts of Europe, the Labour leader, Mr Ruairi Quinn, said yesterday.
Speaking to the Association of European Journalists, Mr Quinn called for the establishment of an Irish Institute for Democracy whose function would be to generate a series of bilateral programmes with each of the applicant states for membership of the EU.
The institute would mobilise the various sectors of Irish society to create specific programmes of education and work experience for sections of the population in each of the applicant states.
These were Estonia, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia and Cyprus. In addition, there were the other two Baltic states, Lithuania and Latvia, along with Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria.
He believed that Ireland had a unique contribution to make to the European Community. The legacy of the Civil War, the bitterness of political conflict, were sufficiently fresh for us as a State to enable us to empathise with the difficulties of the applicant states.
"Enlargement is taking place against the background of a human tragedy of enormous proportions in the Balkans. The demons of the 20th century, which came alive in Europe just under 100 years ago, have not gone away. The problems of conflict, of ethnic cleansing and of nationalist intransigence, sadly, still remain," Mr Quinn said.
The Institute for Democracy would require substantial resources, possibly similar to the scale of the present Overseas Development Aid Programme.