World View/Paul Gillespie: Enlargement of the EU to take in 10 new member-states is the centre-piece of Ireland's current EU presidency. It is, as Pat Cox said on RTÉ yesterday, an historic event, to be celebrated throughout this State on May 1st.
It would be a great pity if it were hijacked by misplaced fears that it will lead to mass migration of peoples to western European welfare states.
There is little or no evidence for this. All the indications are that most of the migration has already happened, as was the case with Greece, Spain and Portugal before they joined the EU - or with Ireland, where the greatest exodus was to Britain in the 1940s and 1950s.
This means we already know a good deal about the acceding states and their peoples. And this week's events show how far Ireland's involvement with the new partners has gone.
David Blunkett set the agenda by announcing restrictions on entitlements from people coming to the UK after enlargement. Or did he? Was he not panicked by an alarmist tabloid media campaign about the prospect of mass migration of welfare scroungers? He resisted pressures from other ministers to impose draconian restrictions because Britain, like Ireland, actually needs them to do jobs their own people won't take in a period of high employment.
The flurry of reaction here his week had as much to do with protecting the common travel area as with a fear of welfare fraud. It was agreed in 1961-62 to protect rights established informally or secretly in the war years and the 1950s to ensure easy Irish access to British labour markets.
We should recall that the £3.5 billion remittances sent back to Ireland in those years was equivalent to the structural funds received in later decades from Europe. And it is likely that the flow of remittances back to central and eastern Europe will have a crucial role in supplementing less generous EU funding available to them in coming decades.
These migrants will contribute to the development of richer economies, filling out their labour deficits; in good part, if they gain access to the majority of EU labour markets which have restricted access unlike Britain and Ireland, they will also deprive their own economies of the skill and energy needed for development.
The latest study shows only about one per cent of people in the accession states intend to, or are expected to, migrate.
Already some 47,000 such workers have come to Ireland under the work permit scheme. That they have become part and parcel of our society was heartbreakingly brought home by the death of the Ukrainian Vasyl Tyminskyy in last Saturday's bus accident in Dublin. A plasterer, he spent three years here, living in Lucan with his wife and daughter, saving the money to build a house at home.
Ukrainians will find it more difficult to get jobs here after May 1st, when the Schengen borders come into play. But we will need such workers and have an interest in ensuring the new borders are not a fortress between Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and their non-EU neighbours there and in Russia.
Embassies from these and others in the region will be lobbying in Dublin to make these points. The Macedonian embassy here was afflicted with tragedy when a delegation to lodge their application to join the EU suddenly had to return home after their president died in a plane crash.
Other news brought home different aspects of our new relationships. The ingenious scam uncovered in west Dublin involved stealing cars to order and then breaking them down for spare parts for the eastern European market. It was run by two Lebanese nationals. A flourishing second-hand car and repair market here is now run largely by immigrant workers, many from eastern Europe.
More ominously, the HIV/AIDS conference sponsored by the Irish presidency heard warnings that the disease is growing most rapidly in central and eastern Europe, Russia and central Asia, especially along transport, labour migration and labour and sex trafficking routes.
The most difficult task facing the presidency is to revive negotiations on the constitutional treaty. The Government is trying to wrap up outstanding disagreements before reporting to a Brussels summit next month on whether progress can be made on the most difficult - the voting system in an enlarged EU. Poland looms large in this work because it wants to stick to the formula agreed at Nice.
Some say the Poles might be more willing to accept a compromise from Ireland than risk a confrontation with Germany which will become bound up with budget negotiations. If so they may insist on a trade-off, inserting a reference to Christianity or God in the treaty. The constitutional theorist Joseph Weiler suggested in a TCD lecture this week that the Polish experience of religion and secularism gives them a privileged basis on which such a deal might be done.
Their constitution contains in its preamble: "We, the Polish nation - all citizens of the republic, both those who believe in God as the source of truth, justice, good and beauty, as well as those not sharing such faith but respecting these universal values as arising from other sources."
Weiler says a similarly balanced preamble would suit the EU constitution better than the existing reference to "spiritual values". It would be more in keeping with a Europe half of whose states have constitutions mentioning Christian heritage or endorsing state religions, while respecting the principle of tolerance on which Enlightenment values is based.
pgillespie@irish-times.ie