The Irish Times view on the EU and coronavirus: Living with the aftershocks
All of the union’s great projects must be recrafted through the prism of the pandemic
As Simon Coveney put it in his speech to the Institute for International and European Affairs on Friday: ‘Even after the virus is defeated, its aftershocks and the new constraints it imposes will define what member states and the union do for the next decade’. Photograph: Henry Nicholls/Reuters
‘World peace cannot be safeguarded without the making of creative efforts proportionate to the dangers which threaten it.” Today, no doubt, he would have said “the health of the world”. But, on May 9th, 1950, then French foreign minister Robert Schuman demanded of Europeans a giant, ambitious leap of imagination and set the ball rolling to launch what is now the European Union.
Schuman Day is marked every year by speeches invoking the spirit of the union’s founding fathers, with often somewhat over-egged estimations of what has been achieved, and what will be achieved if only the project is taken forward. But the 70th anniversary, with Europe engulfed in its most profound challenge since the second World War, is rightly a time for more than ritual self-congratulation.