Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
THE MINISTER OF State for European Affairs Lucinda Creighton has said she is “passionately” in favour of a establishing a federal Europe Union.
Speaking at the MacGill Summer School on Thursday, Creighton said the economic crisis had shown the EU system is “too slow and to difficult to cope with the fast moving pace of our globalised world”.
Creighton added that the Eurozone crisis was “only a symptom” of a much greater challenge – namely, competing with emerging economies like China and Brazil.
Federalisation, she said, could bring Europe closer to its citizens: “We need a competitive federal Europe. Often, the word federal is deemed in Ireland to be a bad word. I fundamentally disagree. Federalism is a very pure and transparent form of democracy.
“I don’t advocate a federation like that in the United States of America – that would not work in a Union of sovereign states as we have in Europe. Rather I favour a federation of nation states, one which is built on the basis of the diversity of its members.”
Creighton said she saw a new federal system as providing a vehicle for Member States to assert their economic sovereignty in the global economy. ”(Member States) may even regain some of the sovereignty that they’ve lost to globalisation, through greater coordination and added economic might. States would benefit from such a federation as they would in fact gain for themselves more rights, more liberty, more authority, more opportunity than they might abandon,” she commented.
Creighton said that decision-making within the EU was often a complex and laborious process, and that federalisation would speed up decisions in areas vital to the European Union as a whole and enable the EU to “address some of the shortcomings” in the currency union and the single market.
“To survive this storm, we must jointly forge a course with our European neighbours,” she said.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
“[The] sacrament is like the 3D glasses we watch movies with; love is not just between the couple themselves, but firmly united with God.”
What kind of weird, 3 way entanglement is this guy trying to badly explain?!?
Love it when celibate old men give advice on marriage.
@Stanley Marsh: you’re assuming that these old men are celibate or always have been. History suggests otherwise in many instances.
That they’re great for the action parts, but really you just wish you had gone to a 2D film on your own.
Next, they’ll need to involve Fortnite analogies in their sermons to reach out to the young generation. The old Jesus story is not selling so well anymore.
So a celibate old men “blesses” young couples in the presence of someone’s corpse with some bizarre incoherent ramblings about a god and 3D glasses. Why is this on the news? Sounds like this people need mental health professional help, not press.
3-D glasses?
One blue eye and one red?
Them 3-D glasses?
At the risk of publicly exposing an unrecognised personal obtuseness, I say: I don’t get it.
Hah?
Sometimes when the clergy get creative all they achieve is a demonstration of their crippled inner awkwardness and psychological unfitness to dictate rules of behaviour or to provide inexperienced advice to mass society.
Like the folk music cringefest introduced in the 1970s. Not a clue. So many of them are the last people to be counselling troubled souls.
This 3-D character might as well have compared marriage to a slinky, a Rubik’s cube, the four of spades, shoe polish, or windscreen wipers.
have your say