Ambassador Bruton bids farewell to Washington

Former Taoiseach and Meath Fine Gael TD John Bruton is returning to Ireland this weekend as his five-year stint as head of the Delegation of the European Commission to the US comes to an end. Last week, Ambassador Bruton addressed a farewell meeting hosted by the meeting of the European Institute in Washington. "My hope, as I leave my post here after five wonderful years, is that, on both sides of the Atlantic, the positive, the foresightful, the courageous and the problem-solving forces in politics will overwhelm the forces of postponement, partisanship, point-scoring and intellectual paralysis," he told the gathering. Mr Bruton said that Europeans and Americans have huge investments in one another. "We have deep ties of blood and culture. We share a deep commitment to the rule of law and democracy. We are, in the large part, military and political allies. We have a stake in one another's success. Thus, we have a stake in one another's politics. American political decisions, or lack of decisions, affect Europe. European political decisions, or lack of decisions, affect America." He said there is a long list of issues on which both entities must work together - relationships with China, with India, with Russia, with Africa, with the Islamic world, the goal of bringing terrorists to justice, and the goal of protecting inventions and investments. Mr Bruton said we need to have a holistic debate about where our money is going. "My concern is that the debate on military and spending priorities takes place among security experts, the debate about fiscal policy among fiscal policy experts, and the debate about foreign relations among foreign relations experts. "But all three are about a single reality - that reality of the ability the peoples of the United States and the European Union have, or do not have, to defend their global interests, at a time when their share of the world's population is likely to fall from only 11.5 per cent today to only 9.5 per cent by 2030, and while we still enjoy as much as 60 per cent of the world's wealth." The ambassador said the issues of climate change, Afghanistan, Iran, healthcare cannot be divorced from whether Europe's and America's tax revenues are likely to rise faster, or to rise more slowly, than their public expenditures. "Politics is about more than the next election. It is about the next generation. Politics in both Europe and the United States needs to get serious about long-term issues: The long-term upward trend in government healthcare budgets; in public pension expenditure; in nursing home care expenditures; in the temperature of the earth's atmosphere, and about that trend's consequences for food and drinking water supplies, for the spread of disease, and for the possible flooding of the homes of the billion people who live close to the sea; the change in the relative population numbers of different countries in the world, and about what that does to the relative claims we each can justly make on the world's resources." Mr Bruton said that the period in America has been a wonderful experience for both his wife Finola and himself, and for their family. "We have visited many parts of this dynamic country and made many American friends. I have come into contact with many interesting people. While time and distance cannot be completely overcome, we do hope we will be able to maintain these friendships and contacts." In recent weeks, Mr Bruton has been refusing to comment on various positions his name has been associated with, including the post of Ireland's new EU Commissioner, the presidency of the European Council under the Lisbon Treaty - which he himself helped draw up - or the Irish presidency in succession to Mary McAleese.