Gay Mitchell (PPE-DE). – Mr President, firstly I welcome this report. I think it is very timely, coming as it does on the eve of the meeting we are about to attend in Wiesbaden. However, – I do not know whether the Commissioner is actually listening to this debate – sometimes I feel we are like gadflies on the periphery, where we raise issues and they do not get much attention except from ourselves when we write very fine reports of this kind.

But I do think that there is an opportunity for innovation and for change. I come from a country where we had famine, literally in recent history – I spoke to somebody who spoke to somebody who lived through the last Great Famine in Ireland: it is that recent. One of the things that made a great change in Ireland, as in the United States, was property ownership. I would like to commend both Nirj Deva and Jürgen Schröder for constantly raising this issue. I think it is an issue we need to raise. We need to try to bring new ideas such as this one to the fore.

If you look at the history of Ireland and how the partition of Ireland came about, in the north of Ireland a lot of people who came there were given small plots of land and ownership of that. From that, they grew flax and they gained capital and prospered. In the south of Ireland we had absentee landlords, and tenants who could not afford to pay their way and who had no ownership of their property.

The same thing happened in the United States, a country that had huge difficulties in the beginning. People were given ownership of property there, and that made a great change. Particularly in Africa and in the Third World generally, we have to start looking at ways we can give people ownership of capital. I believe that, whereas I welcome and support the general thrust of this report, we need to start looking at new ways and added value that we – Parliament, the Commission and the Council – can bring to the issue of the Third World. I think in the area of giving ownership of property, there is an issue worth pursuing.