Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-02-20-Speech-3-398"
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"en.20080220.17.3-398"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I am delighted to speak on this occasion, first to compliment the chairman of the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs, Jan Andersson, for presenting this own-initiative report by the committee, so brilliantly and vehemently written by Mrs Castex in a series of consultations, with the participation of all the members of the committee – some in a particular way – and after nine years as an MEP, I would also like to say: at last we have a report in Parliament that talks about pensioners and the elderly! Indeed, it mentions them a great deal. Tomorrow morning, in my explanation of vote, I will tell you how many times the words pensioner and elderly appear in this report.
It also talks about other things, of course, about the birth rate, about children and about skills training, but I want to highlight this, Mr President: why are we finally talking about the elderly? I am convinced that this is because all the governments are very concerned because having so many elderly compared with so few workers means paying much more for pensions, paying much more for healthcare than in the past.
Just look back 20 years, 10 years, 30 years, 50 years, nobody bothered to think that the elderly needed assistance, that the elderly needed support, that people with elderly parents needed more time off work than in the past. We are beginning to talk about pension schemes, and we are beginning to say there should be more children, and that mothers should be given more help. Did we need this cataclysm to happen, which was compared with climate change by someone who spoke before me?
From bad things, Mr President, I believe good things come, because what I see in this report I approve of wholeheartedly. Finally Europe, in the person of the European Parliament, is showing us how really to be a State. I hope Member States follow this example."@en1
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