Dick Warner is an unwavering Yes voter. But at the end of their family holiday to check out some of the EU applicant countries, will his wife Geraldine, who voted No last time, change her mind?
Soon after the bus from Riga crossed the border into Lithuania it stopped in the forest at a lovely barbecue café made of logs. The whole family immediately decided, on the flimsiest of evidence, that Lithuania was a very nice country.
But we were right. Vilnius is the capital and has the usual awful suburbs. But the centre is lovely - not as grand as Budapest or as theme-parky as Tallinn but clean, stylish and full of character. Our hotel was also one of the nicest of the trip though, unlike everything else in Lithuania, it was expensive.
There was a political demonstration going on. Students chanting outside the Town Hall. I tried to find out what it was about but there were language difficulties. Something about "Freedom". This is an important subject in all the Baltic States.
Their success in gaining independence from the Soviet Union is one of the miracles of late 20th-century history. In 1989 the three capitals of Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius were joined by a human chain of more than two million protesters holding hands. They feel strongly about the rights of small nations. A majority is in favour of EU entry, but a significant minority believes that it will involve giving up part of their very hard-won independence.
Getting out of Lithuania, without visas for Belarus or Russia, to travel to southern Europe, proved to be the most gruelling of all our journeys. I had booked us on the cheap night bus to Warsaw. I hadn't realised that the cheap fare involved travelling on a 30-year-old bus with broken seats, non-functioning air-conditioning and a toilet that remained locked for the whole 10-hour journey. Rough travel indeed. Geraldine thoroughly enjoyed it and accompanied the driver and co-driver into small truckers' cafes in dark north Poland where they drank coffee and she drank vodka.
We dozed the whole day on the train from Warsaw to Budapest, where we collected the laundry we had left there a couple of weeks before. We got seats, but no sleepers, on the Dacia Express. We reached Romania after the usual interminable border formalities.
We were wrecked when we got off the train in Brassov the next morning. Brassov is the second city of Romania, the capital of the province of Transylvania, and it has a particularly ugly railway station full of nasty looking touts offering taxis and accommodation. Sam and I went to find the bank machine. I put in my Visa card, called up the English version and pressed the button for the largest amount on offer. The slot disgorged a huge wad of large and brightly coloured notes. Two million Lei. Sam was very impressed. I did some sums.
"Sam, it's only €60."
"Oh. I wonder if they have Who Wants To Be A Millionaire on Romanian television?"
I had done my homework with the guide-books. I knew there was a road out of Brassov that corkscrewed up the Carpathian mountains to the ski resort of Poiana. I have a theory that ski-resorts are good places to stay in summer, when there are no skiers. I eventually found a taxi driven by a student with very good English who was disappointed by my ignorance about Irish rugby. I directed him to Poiana. His car was a Dacia. These are made in Romania based on a design discarded by the Renault company in the 1960s. Up in the mountains we hit a pot-hole, there was a loud crack and the taxi ground to a halt. A spring had broken and jammed a rear wheel. We spent the next 40 minutes standing in the rain wrestling with the rusted wheel nuts. We hadn't been to bed for the last two nights.
Eventually Dorin arrived to rescue us. Dorin was another taxi driver. A stout man of middle years who smiled a lot and, when he did so, revealed the deficiencies of Romanian dental care. He was also to become our guide, interpreter, financial adviser and friend. He dismissed my theory about ski-resorts. All the hotels were full of wealthy Arabs who come to enjoy the rain. We went to the tourist village of Bran. All the hotels there were full too. We were getting desperate. We ended up back in Brassov at the biggest hotel, the Aro Carpaty Palace.
We had dinner in a dining room that must have seated over 2,000. The four of us were the only guests. We had 16 waiters. Despite the bad start, we fell completely in love with Romania. There are 10 former communist countries applying to join the EU and this was number eight. We had intended to visit them all but we were tired and Romania was just too beguiling. We abandoned Bulgaria and Slovenia.
Dorin took over our lives. I did a deal in which I hired him and his car for €70 a day. It was the best money we spent on the trip. First he organised a villa to rent in Poiana. Then he organised trips to interesting places. We visited Dracula's Castle in Bran, Ceaucescu's Hunting Lodge, 3,000 metres up in the Carpathians, and several of his palaces. He took us to see wild bears foraging in wheelie bins in the outskirts of Brassov and a conservation programme for European wolves. We went shopping in the markets. We had a ball.
Like all Romanians, Dorin loved to talk. He seemed to speak every language in Europe confidently and inaccurately. When his English failed him he would change to German in mid-sentence and was then quite likely to go into French or Italian. I floundered along in his wake. I remembered a conversation I had in Estonia about European integration. The Estonian had said that Europe would never become another United States because they would never agree on a common language - the French would never give up French, the Germans knew theirs was the language of business and the British were incapable of learning any other language. I got this weird feeling that a language called Europish would emerge and that Dorin and I were among the first people to speak it.
His views on Romania joining the EU varied from day to day. The first time I asked him he said, "I am completely against it."
"Why?"
"Because the EU has enough problems without Romania." The next day he had changed his tune.
"How can you in Ireland think of excluding us from Europe? We were at the centre of European civilisation when you were in the Iron Age." But the most significant thing we learned on the whole trip was the life story of Dorin and his wife Roxanne.
She was his second wife and only in her 20s. They had one child together. They both had third-level qualifications - hers was in accountancy, his in engineering. She worked as a bookkeeper for a large company, 10 hours a day, six days a week, for a monthly salary of €100.
He had been through many careers. But his father had developed a heart condition that required a series of operations that could not be carried out in the state medical sector. Paying for them had bankrupted him. He lost his pub, his car and his apartment. Getting back on your feet in Romania is not easy. You can't save money when inflation runs at 25 per cent a year. You can't borrow money when credit costs up to 45 per cent a year. He had scraped together a deposit on a 1996 diesel Opel Vectra that he operated as a taxi seven days a week, 16 to 18 hours a day. At the end of every day he had to drive round and pay a €12 instalment to the man he had bought his car from. His father was now okay.
We had become very fond of them and the kids were visibly moved, listening to the story unfold from the back seat of the Opel. Before he went to bed Sam asked me, "If we let Romania join the EU will Dorin get his pub back?" I tried to explain that it wasn't that simple. Romania's economic problems were a bit of a mystery to me. It should be the richest country in Europe. It has oil and gas, gold and uranium. It should have a wonderful tourist industry with the Carpathian Mountains and the Black Sea Coast and the Danube Delta. It has a sound industrial base with a combination of native industry and foreign investment. It has fertile land with wonderful food and wines. Above all, to judge from Dorin, Roxanne and a lot of other Romanians we met, it has an educated and hard-working people. Joining the EU was not the magic wand that would realise all this potential. But the discipline of meeting the criteria for application, the so-called "Acquis", might be.
Geraldine was very thoughtful.
"Before we came away I had a very negative attitude to enlargement. I thought the EU was already too big and our voice in it as ordinary Irish people was too small. But seeing what it could do for places like Romania has made me realise the positive things it has done for us. And, apart from the 'charitable' aspect of enlargement, I think Europe would be so much richer if all these wonderful places we've seen were part of it. It's the variety and colour of all the different cultures that has really impressed me."
"So?" Luke and Sam were anxious to get the long-running argument settled once and for all. "Which way are you going to vote?"
Geraldine grinned: "Alright, I'll probably vote Yes."
