The German Chancellor, Dr Helmut Kohl, was in excellent and relaxed form yesterday in his address to the Dail, at his press conference and at the dinner last night in his honour hosted by the Taoiseach, Mr Bruton. He has a pleasing capacity to combine the most serious business with a down to earth manner and he demonstrated a felicitous turn of phrase and choice of quotations from Irish writers to drive home his points.
All this is, of course, a hallmark of confident political leadership, a quality Dr Kohl has in abundance. He is, as the Taoiseach, Mr Bruton, put it in his address last night, "above all ... a statesman". He has paid Ireland the considerable compliment of coming here on the sixth anniversary of German unification - the first time he has celebrated it abroad. He has come to Ireland at an auspicious time for this country, in the middle of the EU presidency, just before the first European Council in Dublin on Saturday and at a time when Ireland is on course for the next great step in European integration by joining the currency union. Dr Kohl's sympathetic words of praise and encouragement for Irish political, economic and cultural achievements are highly significant and welcome at this juncture in our history. They convey a confidence that this State will be able to sustain the burdens of closer European integration, including, most notably, monetary union, and has much to contribute to it.
Dr Kohl, as an historian himself, resorts naturally - to that discipline and to the examples it provides as a guide to present and future developments in Germany and Europe. He has proved to be a master of political opportunity and strategy, as was evidenced by the events of 1989-90. He finds in Ireland a state that was prepared to lend support to German unification in those traumatic months and it is striking how clearly the memory is imprinted on German attitudes, especially when compared with the very different and more hostile views coming from our neighbouring island. Dr Kohl's reference to the political and diplomatic significance of the Irish diaspora - "a glue binding the old world to the new" - was also significant. It points up the potential that a national identity separable from territory has in a more interdependent world, as the President, Mrs Robinson, underlined when she opened the Frankfurt Book Fair.
it is also a highly auspicious week for the broad cultural relations between Ireland and Germany. They are given the greatest opportunity ever to develop with this fair, this visit and the opening of an exhibition of Irish cultural achievements in 500 German towns and villages. This will allow the view of a modern Ireland to be portrayed in a way that can put the sentimental and stereotyped German images of a traditional society in proper context. From the point of view of younger Irish generations, Germany will loom very large in the next century. It is heartening to learn the extent to which the Irish educational system has responded to this challenge by developing German language studies over the last decade.
This visit to Ireland by Dr Kohl, who has been described, fittingly, by Mr Bruton as "the outstanding European of our times", should be remembered as a crucial moment in the development of Ireland's role in Europe.