Madam, - Your recent Editorial on the forthcoming Irish presidency of the EU (August 5th) refers to a number of major issues requiring solution. I suggest that an appropriate and significant contribution to the progress of the EU would be to highlight the extreme needs of other small countries in Europe whose economic situation is even more calamitous than was Ireland's before joining the EU.
I have just returned from Kosovo. There, one sees hundreds of desperate young men queuing up every morning for the trucks that take only a lucky few to whatever limited building work is available. Business conditions have been so damaged by Milosevic's repression throughout the 1990s and the ensuing war in 1999 that, in a fertile, agricultural country, markets are flooded with imported food from Turkey and from EU countries. Even chickens from Ireland are to be found (they arrive via Greece)! As the International Crisis Group has observed in recent reports, the EU's failure to address the final status of Kosovo hinders investment, complicates relationships between Albanians and Serbs and retards Kosovo's internal stability.
The social situation in Bosnia also is a cause of grave concern. The recent report of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights documents rising levels of unemployment with those employed receiving very low, irregular paid salaries. The human development index of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) ranks Bosnia-Herzegovina second to last among EU Stability Pact countries.
In this connection, it is surely deplorable that EU countries continue to discriminate against and deport workers from these two very small countries, recently ravaged by war. - Yours, etc.,
VALERIE HUGHES, Cabra, Dublin 7.